From Banned to Birth
First post, yay! This blog has a long story behind it, most of it which transpired today. I had this domain registered for me a while back when George Dubya coined the famous phrase “Internets” and it it caught on as an internet meme. I thought, what a great name for a site…kind of like Dear Abby, except for the internets and all that dwell here. It sat parked at godaddy for quite a while, and I kept thinking…someday I’ll have time to do something with it. Well that day came today…and quite abrubtly I might add.
A little bit of background. A while back I had also purchased a technology news website (blog) that I had high hopes for. It was listed at SitePoint in their auctions section. It had a decent PR and verified income, and pretty decent traffic numbers. According to the seller (with adsense screenshots) it was making about $100/month and had potential. I’d been wanting to get something like that going for a while, so I decided to buy it. That turned out to be a bad decision. Once I got to dig into the backend of the site a little more I realized that a lot of the traffic was trumped up and a lot of other red flags. Oh well, live and learn. I still had the great name, and a lot of potential. I started posting random tech stuff I found throughout the day.
Well, I don’t have the greatest record for repetative tasks, and sure enough the posts started slipping to a couple a week, to a couple a month. No biggie, when I have more time I’ll really start working the site. Well, today was the day I found a great opportunity. There was an article up on Digg about cars that could get you laid and not cost a fortune. It was horrible (I’ll post the link in my next post), and included a Hyundai, and a Ford Crown Vic. Seriously.
BAM…I can make a better list that that! And what better way to get my site some exposure! I decided to call it “10 cars that will (help) you get laid”. Next, list of 10 cars, pics, and a quick description of why each is on the list. Now, the magical step…submit it to Digg. I’ve never submitted any of my own sites to Digg, only news articles I find, MSNBC stuff, etc. I actually don’t submit hardly anything at all, so I was pretty excited. I get to the submit page, and enter in my URL for the story…and this message pops up:
This URL has been widely reported by users as being regularly used to spam Digg’s submission process and cannot be submitted at this time.
Shit. Apparently the previous owner, in his quest to up the traffic/pageviews/revenue/whatever spammed digg and got banned. I would have checked this out if I had even known it existed (note to self). No problem, there has to be a solution right? I’m just some poor guy that bought a domain name that was once used for nefarious purposes…surely there has to be a way to “change ownership” and unban the URL as far as Digg is concerned right? I fired off an email to Digg letting them know what happened and tried to be as polite as possible, I was trying to be optimistic. Here is the response I got back:
Thanks for taking the time to contact us at Digg.com regarding your website.
As you know, Digg is a community-driven website – our community has consistently reported the domain to which you refer as spam.
Because unblocking your domain would not be in line with the best interests of the larger Digg community, we will not reverse this decision.
For more information, please see http://digg.com/faq and http://digg.com/tos .
–Digg Support
Doh. That sure looks like a canned response, and a clear indication that Digg does not give a shit about why the site was banned, only that it was banned, thanks for contacting us, it’s still banned. It will always be banned, we rule with an IRON FIST COMRADE! That really surprised me, as I always thought Digg was sort of grass roots, do no evil type deal (like Google), and that this little mis-understanding could be fixed. Nope. Makes you wonder how much goes on behind the scenes at Digg, because they could really ruin a website that depends on their traffic pretty quick. Like should one site have that kind of power? I guess so. Well that’s that for the old site. I’m not even mentioning it here because it reeks of bad karma and I don’t want to deal with it anymore.
I’m not pissed at Digg, I can (sort of) understand their policies, and with the number of people trying to game their system every single day little guys like me get caught up in the machine. Ce la vi.
Anywho, getting off track here, that is where this site comes in. It will be the new non-banned (hopefully forever!) site that I can contribute random content to the vastness that is the internet…,maybe even get on Digg.
Welcome, hopefully you enjoy your stay, and hopefully come back to some new content every now and then 
P.S. I still plan to post up that article, I just need to move it from the bad juju site over to this one. Cheers!
August 16th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
First Comment, testing format.