As many of you know, I spoke for the first time at SMX Social Media. It was an exhilarating and nerve-wracking experience all the same. In the end, however, I’m glad that I did it.

My presentation was about the infamous Digg and how it can be used to bring your message to the attention of the public. I alluded to some of my 11 Digg tricks and referred to my 29 Digg API tools to improve the Digging experience. Andy Greenberg at Forbes ran an educational piece on what we presented. The most important thing that I should stress is that we like viral content and all you may need is just to give it to us properly by engaging us with content that we clearly enjoy. Eric Enge summarized many of my points and thoughts in his SMX takeaways. I suggest that you take his advice to heart.

The event kicked off with a super Internet Marketers of New York charity party which was sponsored by the nice guys at Best of the Web. The party raised thousands of dollars for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. A lot of the attendees showed up for the charity party, and it was great to see them (again or for the first time!)

As many of you may or may not know, I’m speaking at SMX Social Media, which will be my first speaking engagement ever. Tickets are almost sold out for Tuesday and Wednesday’s conference (but if for whatever reason, you’ve delayed this long, you might as well sign up now and use the code SMX10offSM to get 10% off).

Still, if you can’t make the conference but are free tomorrow night, the Internet Marketers of New York are holding a charity bash from 7PM-10PM. The cost is $40, all of which will be donated to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Everything else is sponsored by the great guys at Best of the Web. One of my friends in the social media sphere is Marty Weintraub, who was diagnosed with Lymphoma, so this hits home. Marty and I will be there tomorrow night… will you?

Be there (and say hello)! Town Tavern Bar & Grill, 134 West 3rd Street (at 6th Avenue), October 15th 7PM-10PM

After writing my piece on why the new Digg just isn’t what it used to be, I already started listening to community feedback regarding the social network that I thought was worth sharing. Since the Digg submission of my story was already buried, I sincerely hope that Digg listens to what their community members have to say.

1. By trying to make Digg more social, it really became less social. (Michael via Twitter)
2. [Today is] the day that Digg died. (Lyndon)
3. I also can’t see if I have Dugg a story until I open it. (webcure)
4. I don’t like that I have to click 2 times to see an article. (webcure)
5. If friends are deemphasized, why does the algorithm still continue to penalize the “top submitters?”
6. WTF, you can only go back 3 pages of friends submissions now? (Alex)
7. It’s ironic that Kevin Rose said that he likes to “build things you click on.” Is that why we have to click twice?
8. Talk about memory leaks in Firefox now that I have to open more windows. If this is a way to thwart blind digging, it’s not working.

As I become more and more immersed in the world of social media, I begin seeing how it’s not just me; social media is a tool that infiltrates our existence and our being. Consider the Digg effect: if your server is ill-prepared for a traffic spike and you hit the front page for the first time, your web host will probably disable your service contract. Within the first few hours, you’re seeing at least 10,000 visitors to your website. That’s substantial. These thousands of users are all accessing your superior content at the same time and are being influenced by what you say. In fact, social media is on the radar of many prominent news outlets. Journalists are watching what is being submitted, and more interestingly, they are watching what you say.

Two examples have arisen this past week.

In anticipation for the highly acclaimed Harry Potter novel, photographed pages of the book have already leaked onto the Internet. Within hours, the discovery was brought to the forefront of the Digg community. The Wall Street Journal covered the initial leak. What tipped them off? This TorrentFreak post seems most likely. After all, it made its way to Digg.

As many of you know, Google and eBay are not on the best of terms right now. At the recent eBay Live event in Boston, some Googlers tried to crash eBay’s party by holding their own Google Checkout Freedom Party to persuade Paypal users to switch to Google Checkout. (The party was since cancelled.) However, the damage was done. eBay pulled its Google ads on AdWords, which resulted in losses for Google of $26 million monthly (or $312 million annually).

Truthfully, the situation is a mess. As many people said, it was very unprofessional of Google to hold their own party in the vicinity of the competition.

The google protest party is in pretty bad taste. Very unlike them..

Google was doing just fine with eBay’s competition. eBay was doing just fine without Google’s competition. All in all, they coexisted and the world was a happy place.

And then this happened.

But what about its aftermath? After eBay had its rift with Google, its traffic actually went up. Bill Tancer of Hitwise confirms this fact, but then says something rather substantial:

25% of eBays search traffic from Google (and thats just the top 5 words) comes from brand, domain or navigational searches for eBay (e.g. “ebay,” “ebay.com” “www.ebay.com”).