Over the past few months Digg has made some changes that allows them to monitor group activities that illegally promote a story to the front page.

“Our systems can tell when it’s happening. Stories reach the home page only when enough legitimate users have put them there. Even if someone were paid to submit or digg a story that reached the home page, what many don’t realize is the combination of factors that ultimately led to that story getting there.”, said Kevin Rose on his February 1st, 2007 blog post.

It is clear that Digg has been updating their tools instead of banning sites that bring real content to the site. Today Neil Patel reports that Digg is letting back sites that have been banned in the past. This is good news for the Digg community and also to those banned sites. Removing Top Diggers list was one of the move that Digg put in place to fight spam. It seems that Digg is confident that they can fight spammers better than just banning sites.

In my opinion, banning sites did nothing to reduce spam on Digg. People can create as many domains as they want and they can create many mirror pages to redirect traffic back to their original content. So I applaud Digg for moving away from banning sites and spending their resources on creating tools that will help identify illegal digging.

David Altschul and Rob Howard from New York recently founded DivShare – a file storage hosting solution similar to YouSendIt, ImageShack and PhotoBucket. DivShare allows you to upload any type of file, share your file and keep you file forever. This tool will definitely come handy when you need to move large files from computer to computer or to send a large file over email to multiple recipients. If you are uploading images, there are options to download them as thumbnails or as full images.

I have to be honest with you; I found this site very easy to navigate. Good use of AJAX technology. DivShare can cater to a web developer who needs to store some temporary files or to an average person who doesn’t know much about technology. Their co-brand feature makes it even better by allowing you to personalize your own download page so when you refer your friends to the download link; they will think that page is your own page. Now that is real cool for such a site.

I had a chance to talk to David about the vision for his site. Here is what he had to say:

“DivShare takes the approach that file hosting and sharing should be easier, faster, and can be done in style. Gone are download limitations, expiration dates, wait lines, pop-up ads, and clunky interfaces. In is a convenient way for anyone to host an unlimited number of files and easily share them with anyone at anytime. DivShare is still a young site and improvements are constantly being added to enhance the user experience and to make hosting, managing, and sharing files easier than ever.”

DivShare is hoping to introduce social networking features to allow users to interact. I have yet to see a business plan that allows them to generate income. Maybe the new features will be their revenue generator.

YouBackItUp, a file hosting service recently launched by Magnus Kåre Skjeggedal Andersen from Oslo, Norway. YouBackItUp is a temporary storage service for all kind of file types that is smaller than 200 MB. You can upload and hold your file for as long as you want. If your file is inactive for more than 20 days then your file will be removed from the server.

I am sure at some point we all had trouble sending or receiving large files over emails. Such service will be handy for anyone who is constantly sending and receiving large files. YouBackItUp is very easy to use as long as your browser supports the latest Java Runtime Environment. You can drag and drop your files and the site will provide you with a unique link to download those files from anywhere.

There are number of other sites that provide similar file hosting services; YouSendIt and Senduit are very similar to YouBackItUp. This is a free service where you don’t even need to register to use it. So just drag and drop the files and take it from there!

Here is what Magnus has to say when I asked about the future of this site:

“The vision is to provide a file sharing service that is easier than our competitors. We try to provide something easier than the Browse button in the browsers which really sucks. With our solution, you can upload thousands of files with just one drag and drop.”

Magnus was also the founder of another site that started two years ago, minkoffert.no; a file storage provider for companies in Norway. According to Magnus, that site has been successful so far so he is giving it a try with YouBackItUp.

One would generally be concerned to upload files to a site that is new. So I would recommend Marcus to get some key sites or people to support his site. Once that is in place, YouBackItUp will be able to earn even more trust from many others. Good luck.

Recently I ran into Jeremy Goodrich who runs FunAdvice.com, a social advice site where you can network, post questions, answer questions, get paid to post and browse & share photos. Jeremy has few prominent players in the same arena to beat but he claims that FunAdvice has some unique features than those sites.

Here is what Jeremy had to say about his service:

What is the vision behind this site?

“Social question & answering, where you can get honest advice from friends. The site combines some of the features of social networking sites such as myspace or friendster (friend lists, private messaging, avatars, photo browse by location, sort by male / female) with question & answering capability such as Yahoo Answers, Yedda, Answerbag, or Askville. The site is a unique blend of features, with easy integration from your personal photo library into your questions, which makes it more fun & interesting the more content you add to your profile page. There is a revenue sharing feature which can be used in conjunction with the FunAdvice widgets so that people can both ask questions and drive traffic to those from their blog, thus adding value to their blog & earning money at the same time.”

When did you launch it? Have you made progress in promoting the site?

“The site was initially launched in March, 2003. In September, 2006, the site was redesigned to include many of the features, functionality, and current GUI that is live on the site now. Today, the site has more than 13,000 members, and more than 30,000 answers.”

Have you had any other successful websites in the past? Are you doing anything else at the moment?

“In the past, I’ve been an employee at many different companies (TrafficLeader, now publicly traded as part of Marchex, Did-it.com, InfoSearch Media which is also NASDAQ listed, and Yahoo) and I’ve co-founded eight different companies, two of which have been sold. My day job for the last thirteen months has been free lance consulting for my eighth company, Asenyo, a boutique SEO consulting firm. With my free time, I help manage the FunAdvice community, and promote the site primarily through word of mouth.”

I had a look at FunAdvice and it does seem like a reliable service for those who are in need of advice for their personal or professional life. Have you ever felt you needed some quick advice on an important, interpersonal matter, but haven’t wanted to use some ‘public’ talk radio, new program, or love line to find out how to hang? Well then check out FunAdvice.com.

Starting an online business has changed. What entrepreneurs need today is a friend who has another friend that has the same interest as you do. No one who has a successful “Web 2.0” or “not a web 2.0” business can tell you the same. Social media and social networking has become a huge part of success in the recent years. You can test your idea to see if it will gain traction or not by just simply adding it to one or two social media or bookmarking sites such as digg, del.icio.us or reddit.

Few steps to be successful with zero down:

1) Come up with an idea that will present itself as a problem solver for a community. Don’t try to reinvent the wheels. Search for an open source code that may be available to a similar solution and twist it a little so that you don’t have to spend time and money to put this together.

2) Don’t do a closed beta testing with the people you know. Release a beta version to the public and let people tell you if they like it or not. Don’t wait for months before you launch it because chances are that someone else is also thinking about the same concept.

3) Make your site simple as possible. Web 2.0 is all about having white spaces rather than clouding it with information. Let the user tell you where they want information on the site.

4) Post your new site to all of the freely available social media and bookmarking sites. You can target the audience by posting in a specific category that best represents your business model.

5) Add new features and recommended features on a daily basis so that you get those people to come back again and again.

6) Feed your users with information about all the changes you are making. Hype it up. A blog on that site would be a good way to do this. Without hype there will be no success. You need to show them how much this new project means to you. If you don’t do this, they will think “well there is no real interest in this project then why should I waste my time here”.

7) Don’t charge your users. Give it away for free and let them get hooked on it. They need to get hooked on to your service and feel that without your service they will be lost. Ask “Diggers what they would do without Digg”. Well try that post it will tell you how crazy they are about that service.

8) Re-evaluate your traction, feedback and the time you have spent on the system in about 6 weeks from the launch date. Ask yourself if you are satisfied with the repeat visitors, are you satisfied with the traction that you are getting, and are you on the right path to being successful?

9) Based on the evaluation, if your answer is “yes” to many those questions around “satisfaction”, and then continue to repeats steps 3 to 6 for another month or so.

10) Re-evaluate yourself here to see if you have gained new users since the 6th week evaluation. If your answer is “yes” then continue to market your site either through paid marketing or similar free marketing techniques. If your answer is “no” then I strongly suggest you move on to another project and not waste any further time with your idea.

Now don’t feel discouraged if you failed with this project. You always gain more knowledge by trying this out than not doing anything. I am sure through the exercise above; you would have gained a lot of knowledge alone with these simple questions: “what if I hadn’t said that or what if I did it this way”. You tried with no money down and you didn’t continue to waste more than few weeks and now you are on to something new. Reuse your code and the concept to see if you can find something that will work for another niche group.

Good luck and please post your experiences here so I can continue to help others.

Sergio Sola, a 20 year old Computer Science student from Vilanova i la Geltru, Spain is currently running a closed alpha test on a new social search engine called AirFind. I’ve had a quick peek into the closed section of the site and was impressed by the amount of work that Sergio has put into this site.

Seeing the success with Digg and other user driven sites, Sergio began exploring new ways to rank search results. Sergio was just not ready to believe that everything should stop when you reach Google.

“AirFind is a new metasearch that allow giving votes to all sites, we are passionate to offer a new way to find the best results, we believe in the social power. Nowadays is very important to provide the correct power to users, we are trying to merge the perfect combination of algorithms and “social power”. At the moment is a very difficult goal to obtain the best results only working with algorithms, is necessary the human presence to correct the algorithms errors”, said Sergio when asked about his vision for the site.

Yes people can certainly tell the difference between a spam and a valuable search result very quickly. AirFind allows the user to then rank the result based on their experience with that link. In his closed testing environment, the site seems pulls results from another search engine but it allows you to vote it up or down for any search result.

AirFind also allows you to add your own site to be added to their search engine. Their spider will query your site and add relevant information to their database.

It is an interesting concept which is similar to oozm.com which has been around for more than a year now. However at AirFind, it seems like you can personalize each of the search results sets.

AirFind reminds me of the Google interface. I hope Sergio can receive a lot of feedback from his alpha testers and get this off the ground. Certainly seems like an idea to explore.

Be the first one to get an account by visiting the following this link (AirFind Invitations).

If anything, I would recommend Sergio to wrap up the testing and move this to a new domain name that will be attractive to the new crowd, the Web 2.0 crowd, before the final launch. The reason that I am suggesting him to move away from AirFind.net is that someone else owns AirFind.com and .net is not that attractive if it isn’t a single word domain name. Just my two sense for him to make this a successful venture.

In a recent blog post, Kevin Rose spelled out how he will fight spam on Digg.com. After going back and forth about recent spam history at Digg, Kevin concludes that Digg will no longer have the “Top Users” section. He believes that Digg’s top users are being blamed for gaming the system. Are you kidding me? Well I am going to try not to be sarcastic about this but there have been many articles that said the same: top diggers controls more than 80% of the front page story. Either they mean to do it or not but that’s the way it happens to be.

Having said that, Kevin’s approach to remove the “Top Diggers” section is not the best approach.  

“Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg.”, said Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg.com.

Well so yes they do spend thousands of hours to be the top diggers and to be on that top diggers page. That was the only incentive Digg provided to those people that spent numerous hours on Digg. Now if this is gone, what is the real incentive for the top diggers that spend thousands of hours on Digg? This move is not going to eliminate the perception of “Top Diggers controls the stories on the front page”. This is rather going to hide the problem so that the public won’t know how top diggers are manipulating the system. This isn’t the real way to solve the problem Mr. Rose. Other Digg alternatives like Netscape and TechTagg offers revenue sharing incentives. Some users who likes the fame will move on to other sites and this will only hurt Digg on the long run. Digg should consider sharing revenue with their users like few other Digg alternatives do. Somehow they need to respect their user base or they are going to end up with bunch of hard heads.

Kevin should rather improve their internal tools to avoid this sort of gaming but you and I know this gaming will never stop. Simply because this is a social media, the bigger your friend’s network is, the better the chance for you to manipulate any social media. Digg should remove the friends tool. There shouldn’t be any friends or group within a social media. Digg is not a social networking site. It is a social media site. Everyone should be on the same grid. Make it harder for people to identify who is digging what. This should definitely reduce the number of spam that reaches the front page of Digg.