Appendix: A Blog Basics Crash Course discuss. On Digg, it makes a big difference who submits a story, since so-called top diggers have legions of followers who pay attention to what stories they are submitting. •
Voting: Social news sites like Digg and Reddit rely on users voting for stories to determine which are the most newsworthy. The more votes a story gets, the higher the story is ranked and the higher the resulting traffic will be. On Digg, stories need to hit a certain threshold of votes before they get front-paged, at which point the resulting traffic can be enough to push many servers into overload, commonly known as the Digg-effect.
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Bookmarking: Social bookmarking sites require users to save or share a URL on their account. Often there is a “Popular” page, where other users can see what URLs are currently getting a lot of attention, and they in turn may save or visit the site themselves.
Discussion Arguably one of the cornerstones of blogs is the ability for readers to discuss the content being posted. This discussion occurs in the form of comments on the page itself, and blog posts by other bloggers linking back to the original post, known as trackbacks. Comments can be switched off or require an account, and while a few famous blogs are set up that way, in most cases commenting is open to anyone and everyone. This also allows spammers to fill the web with comment spam, in much the same way as they do with email spam. Any good blog software package will have some form of spam filter, and it’s a good idea to install one of these early on to save yourself time moderating comments endlessly to get rid of the rubbish! Common Terms: •
Moderating Comments: Most blogs are set up so that the blogger must approve, reject, or mark a comment as spam, known as moderating. To make life easier, the blogger can set a rule that once a particular commenter has had one comment approved, they no longer need to have comments moderated.