New Digg Feature = Friend Spamming: Proof of Concept

Update: Ive added like 200+ friends. This is ridiculous. – Story Buried at 46 Diggs. Hmmm. Who would have thought? Maybe they wouldn’t be able to handle the #of friend requests if it had hit the front page… – Here is my Befriended List – You have to be logged in to Digg for the exploit to work In what has got to be the stupidest move in the history of community features, Digg has created a URL-powered friend-adder. Basically, all you have to do is visit the url http://digg.com/invitefrom/{username} such as http://digg.com/invitefrom/russvirante and you automatically add them as your friend if you are currently logged in to Digg. So, why is this royally stupid? Why should the inventor / everyone who thought this was a good idea go...

Website Launch Flowchart

With our roots in the entrepreneurial world, we frequently get involved with clients at the very beginning of both their business and website. To be as helpful as possible, we thought ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have something visual that shows everything we intend to do”. Off we went to our trusty search engines, searching for things like website design, website development and our new favorite ‘website launch’. While there were some fairly straightforward charts for website design, nothing really captured the essence of what we do – take people from nothing to fully functional websites that are capable of generating income. So we put together the website launch flowchart – what we refer to internally as our optimized design...

theGoogleCache Redesign

Hello All, You may have noticed a couple changes around theGoogleCache; phase 1 of the redesign is complete. We have made graphical updates, improved search capabilities, and added more functionality to the blog in hopes of making for a better overall experience while viewing. We hope to be adding additional functionality and features to the site in the coming weeks so keep an eye out. Thanks for visiting and by all means let us know what you think, we’d love to hear from you. Virante No tags for this post.

Cache Wars: Responses to Popular Redditor Comments

Language Issues: Please read this first, or you will sound like an idiot when you comment. First, no one, in any court case (please prove me wrong), has sued on the basis of having their content “cached”. The issue is caching+redistribution. Most importantly, it is caching+redistribution on another site, often a for-profit site with advertisements, without consent from the author. In terms of search engines, we will use the word “indexing” to the simple act of “caching” a page. When I refer to “caching”, I mean the redistributed cache of the page or the process of copying and redistributing the page. Finally, let’s quickly acknowledge the similarity between “quotes” and “paraphrases” in...

Viral Marketing Ethics

In such a nascent industry as online viral marketing, or more specifically, social media marketing, it is important to take a step back and attempt to discern a framework of ethics that will guide the industry. As is the case in almost all new marketing frontiers, a handful of groups have already begun working on exploitative methods that will… Largely be countered soon Smear more legitimate tactics However, hardly impact their effectiveness As predictive (like an SNL skit) a scenario this will be, it is still a valuable exercise to go ahead and outline a few ethical guidelines, ones that Virante already institutes when approaching social media marketing. Participate: Almost all major social marketing sites have or will soon incorporate reputation-based...