When a website, or any appliance, for that matter, becomes a verb, you know they have done something right. "To digg" has become an important addition to this noun-turned-verb crowd. Do you think it annoys Yahoo! that despite their best efforts, their name as a verb means something like "to make a fool of oneself?"

• You can submit your own content to Digg; however, whether your content is dugg en masse has a lot to do with the status of the person who submits the article. Think of it as Washington DC. You want to get an influential lobbyist to work on your behalf, because even if your initiative is awesome, no one will listen if you have no reputation.
• When someone else diggs your content without your knowledge, you'll probably not be ready for a huge increase in traffic. If your site is strong enough, an untimely digg isn't going to hurt you. In fact, as Guillaume Bouchard mentions in his blog post about being dugg during alpha phase, the traffic served as a free stress test, and the Digg comments were a free usability report.
• If you have digg-worthy content, consider enabling a comments form, or some type of participation, whereby users have to register in order to ...

WhosTalkin is a new search engine for the social media landscape. It searches across 40+ popular social media applications, providing in depth results not usually seen in the mainstream search engines. In their own words:

WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.

Joe Hall asked me to beta test the system and aside from a few minor issues my first impressions are very positive.

The Interface and Controls

Top marks for making this simple and intuitive. Steve Krug would approve. My first choices are limited to a single search box, which gathers results from all their sources.

You can then drill down results by each source, listed on the left. These range from Twitter, Technorati to Bloglines and YouTube. Simple enough. My only complaint here would be the need to operate two scrollbars, one for the menu and another for the results. Even with the site at full screen, the design is limited by a fixed height. It would be goo... read more >>