Happy Birthday! Rupert Murdoch Turns 77
Born on March 11th, 1931, Murdoch has built one of the largest media conglomerates in history. Recently, Murdoch has purchased one of the most respected newspapers worldwide: The Wall Street Journal. “Murdoch likes to say he has 20 good years left. His mother is 98,” says Eric Pooley on a TIME exclusive.
In 1953 when he inherited control of two Australian newspapers. Murdoch expanded to Britain in the 1960s, the U.S. in the ’70s, and Asia in the 1990s. In Britain Murdoch owns the biggest tabloid, the Sun, and in the U.S. the New York Post.
“Murdoch appears to be at the height of his powers. He views Dow Jones, along with the recent launch of the Fox Business Network, as steps in the creation of a globe-spanning financial news powerhouse,” notes Tim Arango, a journalist for FORTUNE.
Arango asks, “Can he do it? The breadth of his ambition could be his Achilles heel - the more dominant News Corp. becomes, the more opposition it tends to provoke. Still, Murdoch has proved time and again that counting him out is a high-risk strategy.”
Murdoch was awarded the 2nd most powerful CEO by FORTUNE in 2007 for his position as chairman of News Corp. — the world’s third largest media conglomerate, with a value of $68 billion, and one of the few mega-corporations controlled by a single individual.
Eric Pooley describes Murdoch as living “like an old-fashioned tycoon too, hopscotching the planet on his 737 and recharging on his yacht off St. Tropez. Recent stop: London, where he got thrown from a horse (but didn’t break anything — too busy).” Building a giant media company does have it’s perks, you know?
The Winner of Comment Contest
Seven days ago, we started a contest to give away 500 Entrecard credits to a random users whom commented on an article. Today congratulations goes to ‘Entrepreneur’ from entrepreneur.com.sg. Again, Congratulations!
A huge thanks goes to everyone who participated. Be sure to come back for our other prizes.
Digg Dugg Its Own Grave
I’ve been banned from Digg. I used to love Digg, but I’ve done something to Digg it didn’t like. I’m now an “invalid user.” Digg you’ve dugg your own grave; you’re no longer run by users, but robotic editors. And It’s editing content and denying the existence of an editor that killed you. It’s also the ease of dirty digging, like hurting your competition’s website that kill you.
Many of you have heard of the Digg Auto bury, it’s the editorial-robot killing hundreds of great stories every month. It’s the robot that kills most of forevergeek.com, johnchow.com, copyblogger.com’s stories — and now it killed my user name.
But don’t ask digg about autobury, it still believes “Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content.”
Yet, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, explains the autobury feature of digg, “When a single URL hits a threshold of reports, our standard procedure is to block that URL from submission.” If automatically blocking a URL from digg isn’t editing content, what is?
Stefan Juhl researched the idea of internal edited and found the “last referrer before the [bury] was crawl3.digg.internal.” It’s an internal autobury indeed.
“Mostly, landing on the Digg front page a couple times a month resulted only in a server-shaking stampede of worthless traffic. But mixed in with the basement-dwelling little boys who momentarily refrained from Playstationing with their Wiis long enough to tell me I sucked, I picked up new subscribers,” said Brian Clark from Copyblogger.com.
And now you can get even more subscribers and visitors by digging your competitor’s graves. It’s extremely easy to kill your competing site on digg, just follow these steps to get his or her domain on autobury. It’s called “dirty digging.”
How to Digg Your Competitors Grave
1. Submit and Title Posts for Your Competition. And make the title standout, something like “Check this Post Out on Domain.com” or “This Was ReAlly Cool.”
2. Create a Free Email Account Using The Domain Name. Go to Yahoo or Hotmail and create an email (yourcompetition@hotmail.com). Now have the domain’s RSS feed and digg every new post, again using spam titles. Keep submitting only the domain’s posts until you get the domain banned.
3. Keep Creating New Accounts. Go to the library one day and create 15 or more new email accounts and digg accounts. Then submit posts only from your competitors domain.
4. Now Bury Each Post. Use an account that hasn’t submitted the stories and bury each one. And if you want a ban even faster, get 15 or more of your friends on digg to bury the stories.
5. Contact the Power Users. Again using a fake email, contact some power-users and ask them if they’re interested in getting paid to digg a list of stories. Be sure to list each post from your competitor’s site.
Along with how easy it is to use digg to do your dirty work, digg and all social media have reverted the trend back to individual blogs — where the blogger has complete control and can’t be banned. It’s this trend back to blogging that came from digg’s hypocrisy that killed it. Saying the users control the content seen on digg, then creating an autobury is hypocrisy.
As Lee Odden, a fellow blogger at toprankblog.com, explains, “The issue for me is when people try to submit a story they want to share with the digg community and get an error message ‘This domain name is banned from submissions’ it sends an inaccurate message. My complaint is not about being off of digg, its about someone else making that decision arbitrarily and digg support acting very much like DMOZ. And we all know where DMOZ ended up.”
