Mikey and I take over the headlines!

Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan is using a YouTube channel to engage in cross cultural dialog. Her first challenge is to break down stereotypes about the Arab world by calling on people to submit their own to her, which she will then answer.

“I want people to know the real Arab world. To see it unedited, unscripted and unfiltered. To see the personal side of my region. To know the places, and faces, and rituals, and culture that shape the part of the world I call home.”

I love seeing social media used for positive change, and I can’t think of a better one than more dialog between Westerners and Arabs. We have so much to learn about each other. It would be great to see someone do the flip side for the Arab world.

I remember passing a TV in Tanzania and cringing because it was just one gangster rap video after another. Violence, misogyny, crass materialism and drugs on repeat - just change up the guy getting the close ups every 4 minutes. It was disheartening to hear that those videos were the primary cultural lens on through which many people in Africa saw us. No wonder so many thought so poorly of us, or came to our side of the world and struggled to fit into our social norms.

It’s great that so many people all over the world now have satellite TV, but often it’s hard to cut through the noise and get a clear picture of what life is really like where those signals come from. And the internet is just a network of cables until we use it for good like Queen Rania is doing. Here’s hoping more people that want to change the world start adopting these tools that have so much potential.

Kevin Rose announced that Digg recently changed their algorithm to make it harder to use a cabal of friends to get your content on the front page. If you have no idea what Digg is, it’s very popular website where users submit and vote on stories and the most voted stories make the front page.

The algorithm changed the way stories get to the front page. Now, they require more “diversity” of member votes, so a group of people can’t guarantee that their story will make the front page just because they all voted.

There’s a real problem with small cabals of people getting their content too often on the home page of Digg. About half of the front page stories are submitted by the top 100 Digg members. You only have to watch Digg for a week or two to see that groups with pet causes constantly get front page status. Look, I think Ron Paul is a sharp guy and Ubuntu Linux is really neat. But too many stories about the same subjects make reading Digg boring.

Marketers are freaking out. Some even went so far as to say that if the marketers leave Digg, it runs the risk of withering. Are you kidding? That’s absolute nonsense. Digg never needed marketers to try and use the system to get attention for their customers.

I use Digg both as a user and to share stuff that I work on, like our recent ConceptShare V2 launch. We made the front page of Digg for that story, not only because we asked our friends to vote for it. I only submit stories that I think will be interesting to the Digg community, and I took a lot of care to write the title and description in a way that would be interesting to them. Most importantly for me, I’m always transparent. Those things all add up.

It’s an open secret that Digg is for sale. I’m guessing here, but I’d venture to say that a key reason Digg hasn’t been acquired yet is their community. The Digg community is notoriously young, male and has all the charming qualities that go with being 13 and anonymous. They even had a standoff with the company (and won) over wanting to post the key to decrypt HD-DVDs, exposing Digg to considerable legal risk.

Digg needs to prove to potential acquirers that it can adapt to outsmart people gaming the system, intentionally or not. The service itself needs to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior, because the latter can easily ruin the experience for everyone. If that makes it a little harder for me to get a story I submit to the front page, well so be it.

In November I spoke at nextMEDIA: Monetizing Digital Media. I got some major props for my talk, and a lot of people who heard about it have asked me to write it all down and share it online for everyone. I’m still working on that, taking my time because I want to do the subject justice. In the meantime here is my 20 minute talk edited down to 7 minutes. I hope you enjoy it! Please feel free to post any questions in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them.

If you’d like me to speak at your organization, please drop me a line.

Click To Play

commandN 83 was a special episode! It was my first time meeting Jeff MacArthur, the Photojunkie came to shoot us, I nervously did my first techTIPS segment, and an old commandN friend made a special guest appearance at the end. That’s a lot!

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headLINES
NBC Primetime on Mobile Phones
NIN releasing songs in GarageBand format
Xbox Live for Vista Users
Don’t choose Facebook over your job
Wiki now in Oxford English Dictionary
Lily Allen in Simlish

techTIPS
Will’s Facebook Apps

webPICKS
OSNews
Kayak
Kismac

digg commandN in the new digg Podcast directory!

technorati tags:nbc, mobile, nin, garageband, xbox, vista, facebook, wiki, simlish, osnews, opensource, kayak, travel, flights, kismac, wifi