Dear Mr. Rose,

I am writing to follow up with you regarding correspondence with a member of your team several weeks ago. I inquired about a domain that seems to be on your auto-bury list. Granted, you have never admitted to an auto-bury list, but the statistics speak for themselves. In the first link, it is obvious that the last story that was not buried was also popular and hit the front page 184 days ago. As of this writing, it has 903 Diggs. Not too shabby. However, in the second link, it appears that every single story submitted since then has been buried. That includes a total of 25 stories. One of them is from less than 24 hours ago and was buried with 2 Diggs. As an avid user of your service, I don’t think it would be off the mark to say that you are burying stories internally given that it is very rare for stories with less than 5-10 Diggs to be buried from my observations (and you know how often I wander the halls of Digg). I’m going to go a step further and make a claim that you are not only burying stories internally; you have a method of burying domains after an arbitrary amount of time has elapsed since the story was submitted. Here was a story from the domain that I submitted that got buried with 45 Diggs. Somehow, it accrued another 60 after it was buried. I have a hard time believing that the democratic voice of Diggers was responsible for this story’s burial. Similarly, these two stories are good Digg content, and I think that a good number of people would agree with my claim.

Thanks, Apple, for listening to me. I’ll manage without the storage by trimming down some songs, which will be a difficult task, but my WiPod is here. Awesome.

In case you missed it, Apple’s highly anticipated iPod launch was today. Notable appearances included the new iPod Nano (complete with three games: Sudoku, Vortex, and a third unknown game), the iPod Touch or what I call the iPhone without the phone ($399 for 16GB, $299 for 8GB), the familiar iPod Classic ($299 for 80GB, $399 for 160GB!), and a reduced price on the iPhone: we’re talking $200 off to $399.

So, what do you say? Are you going to be buying one of these anytime soon?

My ever-so-brilliant BFF wrote an interesting piece about whether blogs should be a primary marketing initiative or if email newsletters should still be in play. Lisa’s question was prompted by a blog post by Dawud Miracle which poses the same question. And Yaro Starak believes he has the answer: no.

I’m with ya, pal. Lisa writes about how Bruce Clay has both a blog and a newsletter. She says that the newsletter (surprisingly!) has more readers than her oh-so-personable blog. Surely, you’d think more people want to read Lisa’s humor and wit. I sure do.

But Lisa has a point. And yesterday I had a phone conversation with Gary Price about how podcasters are so immersed in their shows that they lose sight that the average person is not familiar at all with podcasting technology. To be completely frank, I still have doubts about the lifespan of podcasts and think that the multimedia overload is still too much to handle. (That doesn’t stop me from making occasional guest appearances on one social media podcast, though.)

I’m getting a bit frustrated with the hundreds of posts that speak about individuals who claimed to invent Facebook before Mark Zuckerberg.

Here’s the real Facebook, long before I joined the social network myself:

Truthfully, it doesn’t matter who invented Facebook. Facebook is like Classmates.com. Facebook is like Friendster. Facebook is like MySpace. And these three social networks, which were based on very similar concepts, predated the Facebook that we know and love today.

As I commented on the VentureBeat blog post, I knew about the concept of a Facebook before it even caught on. It was not a surprise to me when I joined, and I joined not as a college student but as a college graduate. In a way, I did so because at that time, it was in private beta. Looking back on it now, it was an honor to be in the first few thousands of users on Facebook.