A Technological take on the porn industry – Free The Porn

After reading the title of this entry I assume you might be taken a back. When I first saw Free The Porn I had the same reaction. After I removed my bias and looked at the site for what it really was, I realized that Free The Porn is worthy of a review, like PornoTube was. Some of you may have read Michael Arrington’s summary on PornoTube a few weeks back on TechCrunch. While PornoTube is the YouTube version of pornography; Free The Porn is the delicious/digg version of pornography.

Most people in the world of technology enjoy the idea of social bookmarking. Social bookmarking allows people to see websites and articles that they may have missed without the help of those with similar taste. This idea can easily apply to the pornographic industry. Certain people enjoy certain aspects of the sexual experience. When a website appears on the main page of Free The Porn, users have the ability to tag the website and vote the site up. Each submission provides you the opportunity to comment, email or blog about the website/story.

Users only vote on a website if they wish to add the submission to their favorites list. This is basically the del.icio.us school of thought but instead of “save,” it is “vote.” Another interesting function of the site is the navigation in the top right corner. You can organize the homepage’s stories by “votes,” “recent,” “title,” and “URL.” This easy navigation between the essential functions truly allows Free The Porn to shine.

The website is still in it’s infant stages, but just like PornoTube, I expect this site to explode in the coming weeks. The pornographic industry is one of, if not the biggest, industry on the Internet. Most websites in the genre are pure spam and cost money; sites like PornoTube and Free The Porn are well designed, and free. Look for the quality (in terms of navigation and technology) to improve over this coming year.

Digg Adds Video Screenshot Preview For All Digg Video Submissions

Ever click on a Digg video submission and regret it 5 seconds later? Well those 5 seconds will no longer be in limbo with the new Video Screenshot Preview Digg has JUST added. To the right every video submission there will be a screenshot for your viewing pleasure. Want to see how it works? Take a look:

From the Digg Blog:

Starting today, all newly submitted videos from YouTube and Google will include static thumbnail previews. Support for Yahoo! videos is coming soon.

This feature is a great addition to Digg, and we here at Ibloggedthis expect for other social bookmarking sites to pick up on this nifty idea. Reddit has a major need for this, and hopefully they will be man enough to copy Digg.

Top 10 List of How To Get On The Front Page Of Digg OR Reddit

Reddit Tips from the Top Ten Reddit Users

Tips on How To Get to The Front Page. (On Digg)

Recently I read both of these stories on how to improve your chances of getting on the front page of Digg or Reddit. Coincidentally, both of these stories made it to the front of each of their own sites. Both pieces had a lot of great information and this is the top 10 list of tips for making it on either Digg or Reddit.

#10 Grammar Matters. If you can’t be understood, your content won’t get the recognition it might deserve. The easier something is to read and understand, the better!

#9 Don’t Dupe. Make sure your story is unique and has yet to be posted. Nothing worse than posting something everyone has already read!

#8: Patience Is A Virtue. You won’t be a top submitter right away. Keep working at it with quality and quantity. Eventually you can rise to prominence!

#7: Be Helpful. Posting helpful information and more content (from personal knowledge or another reputable Internet source) is always a good way to make friends and gain respect.

#6: Timing. There are numerous articles about the best time to submit stories. In general, if you can get your story out early in the morning, right before everyone gets to a computer, then you got a leg up.

#5: Know Your Community. For Digg, anything that has anything to do with Apple has a chance, with Reddit not so much. Digg is a tech site at heart, Reddit is a interesting news site. Adjust!

#4: Personal Blogs. Don’t become a spammer, only link to stories that you really think are interesting. If you submit your own stories, only submit your best articles.

#3: Concentrate On Your Interests. If it isn’t fun for you, then it becomes labor. Make sure you are submitting something that interests you, chances are there are other people who enjoy your interests.

#2: The Title. The best way to get a vote on either Digg or Reddit is to catch the audience’s eye. If the title stinks, no one cares.

#1: RSS Feeds.. Have a lot of them. If you are constantly getting cool and new stories then you can easily pick and choose which stories you want to submit to either Digg or Reddit.

Selling Your Soul: Digg Style

Late last night Techcrunch wrote about one Digg.com user who was selling his profile on ebay.

Here is a look at the auction as of late last night:

This situation has caused a lot of debate among the internet community. Most people feel that the idea of selling your account for money is selling out, while some feel it is a smart business decision. What most people agree on is the fact that this is most likely against the Digg TOS, and that the account will be deleted shortly.

What really made this interesting was the fact that the digg profile for sale was hacked by another digg member:

The member who originally owned the digg profile had a password of “digg” set for the account. Genius.

The “hacker” returned the profile, nice of him.

The auction is currently at $325.00, you can track the progress of the auction Here

Screenshot Of Reddit’s Homepage As Of Late Last Night

For those of you who don’t know, there was an interesting “Reddit vs Digg” conflict yesterday. Essentially at the end of it all, Digg would bury any story that had Reddit in the title, and Reddit had 4 of their top 10 stories pertaining to Digg. Score one for Reddit!

Idiocy defined (see Digg)

****del.icio.us this post to spread the word on digg’s idiocy.

One user who frequents both Digg and Reddit made a clever joke today. On the Reddit site, the user made a post with the title of, “Recursion defined (see Digg).”

Obviously, this post points to a Digg post that has a title of “Recursion defined (see Reddit).”

For those of you who don’t understand. This is essentially the geek version of:

A very intelligent and witty joke by the user jgrahamc. The only problem is the fact that Digg found this joke story to be worthy of a banning. Here is what jgrahamc had to say on Reddit:

And guess what, for submitting this joke story I’ve just been banned from Digg. My account has been disabled without warning! Jeez, Digg staff get a sense of humor. John.

Nice job Digg, you really came out on top on this one…

Digg 3.0 launches with a redesign and extended topics

As expected, Digg 3.0 has launched this morning. The Digg 3.0 site sports a redisign, with a new layout, and also expands Digg’s categories past Technology related topics.

The new categories and sub-categories are:

Technology > (Apple, Design, Gadgets, Hardware, Industry News, Linux/Unix, Mods, Programming, Security, Software , Tech Deals)

Science > (Space, Environment, Health ,General Sciences)

World & Business > (Business & Finance, Politics, World News, Offbeat News)

Videos > (Animation, Comedy, Educational, Music, People, Gaming)

Entertainment > (Celebrity, Movies, Music, Television)

Gaming > (Gaming News, Playable Web Games)

Digg 3.0 coming Monday with major improvements and changes

As usual, TechCrunch got the scoop on the upcoming Digg 3.0 update, which is launching this Monday. The update will feature an expansion of categories, as Digg venturers into the unknown, as well as a site redesign with major improvements.

In addition to a redesign (that retains the essential Digg “experience�), Digg is adding a number of news categories beyond technology. Topics are grouped into six “containers�, including technology, entertainment, gaming, science, world & business, and online video. The default view on Digg is still the technology container, although users can change that view and can also deselect individual topics within containers to further refine what they see on the home page.

With the site traffic doubling about every two months, Digg currently generates 800,000 unique visitors, and over 9 million pageviews on a daily basis.

Look for the new Digg 3.0 to launch on Monday morning. Check out the article for screenshots and more.

AOL launches Digg-like website

AOL just launched a huge “Digg Killer” website. With about 30 topics to choose from, the site works almost like Digg. The users submit and vote on articles, however, unlike Digg, an editor, or “anchor” as they are called on the site, decides which stories make it onto the front page, and which don’t.

The current home of this site is beta.netscape.com and it will eventually become the new Netscape.com, when they beta is over.

The launch of this AOL site comes just days after the news of an upcoming digg expansion, which will expand digg into categories other than technology.

Wordpress Caching How To

On Friday afternoon one of the articles we posted made front page of digg. After about 3-5 minutes the server load shot up to about 200, which pretty much took the machine offline. Our host was able to get on the machine, disable the site temporarily, and get the server functional again.

We spent the next half hour researching caching options for wordpress. We finally decided to setup WP-Cache 2.0.

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

Once we setup caching we were then able to bring the website back up, and keep the server load to about 10-15, which was more than acceptable, especially for being on the front page of digg.

So, here is a quick how-to on setting up caching on your wordpress to be (a little more) prepared for a high burst of traffic.

1. Download WP-Cache 2.0
2. Unzip the file, and place the contents in wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/
3. Create wp-content/cache directory, and make sure that Wordpress can write to it
4. Activate the plugin in the Plugins screen
5. Add the following line to you wp-config.php file: define(’WP_CACHE’, true);
6. Under the Options screen, select “WP-Cache” and enable caching.

• For further instructions and troubleshooting, please read the README file included in the zip.

Your wordpress should be caching now. You can now play around with the settings in the WP-Cache screen to customize it to your liking. You can also see how many pages are being cached, in that same screen.Please be aware that although you are now caching, depending on your hardware and connection type to the internet, your server might still not be able to handle all the load.