The Venture Skills Blog

Oh yes welcome to another sarcastic Friday round up, this week has been a little farcical for many aspects of the web.

Digg Eats itself

Unless you have been sitting under a stone you can’t help but noticed that Digg community had a bit of a bad time last few days, you can read the full story on my own blog, though by far the best commentary is coming from Greywolf.

However after it all dies down we have learnt several things.

• Digg auto burying feature can be beaten by brute force (oh wait sorry breaking news Digg can auto bury posts!)
• Digg does have moderators but they can be beaten by brute force
• Kevin Rose certainly can make a bed (he is very domesticated)

Personally I don’t know what the fuss was all about, after all if you take any HD-DVD and cast it into a nearby fire, it will reveal the secret language of DRM and utter the key that shall not be spoken here.

Luckily we have all learnt some valuable morals

• Mobs rule ok
• double standards are fine
• Never apologise

So arn’t we glad it happened, I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner and I’m impressed how lightly Digg got away with it. I think this is partially due to the Digg pack of hot heads have yet to come of the adrenaline pump and start to realise how much manipulation was going on to try and hold the flood gates back.

Yahoo does microformats

Well not exactly as detailed yesterday Yahoo has launched a new microformat to tell search engines which parts of a page are off limits. currently limited only to Yahoo and causing a large amount of controversy around the blogs. Another great write up by Andy Beard covers most of the perceived problems and offers a nice solution to spotting hidden areas.

Microsoft to buy Yahoo

you heard it hear first, oh wait this is old news, nope its new. The height of American journalism the Seattle Times has an article on the merger of the two companies. It’s been talked about for years, and lets face it msn sucks what better way for Microsoft to take on Google then removing the 3rd competitor. Will it happen probably not but I’m sure a few bloggers will make sure you think it will.

In case you missed them

A couple of the posts you might have missed and really should read,

• Scratching that itch, our new series following building a niche site from start to finish
• Voyeurs vs Sheep, a statistical analysis of Digg and Stumbleupon
• Flash the SEO devil - A quick guide to making flash SEO angel

Also if you haven’t already check out my Guest blog post at Payment Blogger where I went all grey hat.

Finally

We are moving real soon and I mean real soon, the back end db, is up and just finishing testing now.
If you haven’t all ready make sure your booked on to all about asking and Sleek Pixel will be launching Monday more info over the weekend.

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