Social Media Takes Year End Beating

While desperately holding out hope there's actually be something other than agency holiday cards to write about as the week draws to a close, we found two interesting pieces about the back lash of social networking. The first story comes from CoolzOr who announces he now officially hates social networks. What caused him to arrive at this state of mind. A growing social network-focused search engine called Spock.

Spock is one of those social applications that spreads virally and that is supposed to be a search engine of sorts for the billions of bits and bytes of information generated from social networks. It's supposed to make it easy to find information about people you now on the internet. Trouble is, some people think it pries too deeply into the information people place on their social network profiles. Some also feel it generates an insane amount of email notifications and it makes it nearly impossible to stop the notifications and the collection of information.

Some might argue, what's the big deal? That's exactly what Google does. Apparently, snooping for, tagging and categorizing people's social networking information which is supposed to be viewable only by "friends" is a bit much for some.

The second interesting bit of information we found to day came from Copyblogger, a blog that has seen its subscriptions rise from 6,000 to 29,000 in one year. Most of that growth came from "appealing to social news and bookmarking sites" and bloggers. As Copyblogger's Brian Clark explains, bookmarking site Digg played a very parge part in his sites growth. Over the past year, Copyblogger landed on the front page of Digg a couple times each month drawing tonss of readers to his blog. Some of the people who came didn't stick around. Enough did though to help the site become as successful as it is.

All good one would think but not every story has a happy ending. This one, apparently, doesn't. For some time, people have surmised Digg has an "auto-bury list," a list that purportedly eliminates a site's ability to appear high in Digg's listings and eliminates the ability of the listed site's content to appear on the front page. Clark says Copyblogger has been placed on this list which will dramatically harm Copyblogger's visibility on Digg. That translates into lower traffic and lower potential subscriptions. Not good for a site that wishes to expand its reach and, to date, has done a great job. If the list truly does exist, it's certainly a clandestine blemish on the world of social networking.

Though Digg, apparently, won't acknowledge it, the list's existence certainly does have a purpose. After all, there's all sorts of autobot crap out there that automatically submits sites to Digg and man other social bookmarking sites. And eliminating these sites from social bookmarking sites is, indeed, a very good thing. Let's just hope the list is used only for that purpose and not to wield authority over organic social bookmarking.

So there you have it, some non-holiday news as you, well, approach the holidays.