Others were less kind.

Like Michael Moore on a budget, I was overcome with a faux-naif sense of wonder. Just why are Digg users so damn unpopular?

I decided to digg out (arf!) my natty deerstalker and use a little ol’ fashioned detective work to find out for myself.

My first port of call was the Digg Top 100 users list. Digg, bless ‘em, are sufficiently embarrassed by the behaviour of this motley crue of geeks that they’ve stopped publishing the list.

Perhaps, I thought, profiling the most successful Diggers would offer valuable insight into their complex, analytical minds. After all, successfully judging a website without visiting it must require staggering reasoning skills. Those sub-tabloid headlines and semi-literate 20 word summaries don’t write themselves, you know.

I hit pay dirt pronto. I discovered that a depressing number of the Digg stereotypes are true, assuming the power users to be a representative sample:

• 89% are male
• 72% are American
• 68% are under 30 years old
• 73% live with their mothers*

(* Only one of these is made up. The rest are based on Digg profile info, FaceBook/MySpace/Pownce profiles, info given on personal blogs etc).

Unfortunately, the ‘25 year old virgin’ stereotype was a little harder to test (unless some of the profile pictures are an indicator). So I started to take a look at Digg Power user’s ‘favourite links’ for more insight into this mysterious creature - and more importantly, their agendas.

At least three run shonky homebrew Digg clones (and I don’t mean Mixx.com).

At least three of the top 100 are employees of Digg or the cheap Calacanis clone Netscape Propellor.

At least four of the top 100 are spammers ’social media experts’ who specialise in manipulating sites like Digg for pleasure and profit.

At least one Digg power user is active - for cold hard cash, perhaps? - on a spammy Digg clone called, er, PaydayAdvanceUK.com (I kid you not) owned by Canadian company Blizzard Interactive.

At least one is a grown man who loves Warhammer 40,000 and is happy to admit as much in public.

Understand now why this bunch of misfits might not be interested in Digging your content?

PS. Er, best not to Digg this post.

WpAdMentor is a WordPress plugin that offers a quick ‘n’ dirty alternative to OpenAds.

WpAdMentor integrates with WordPress’s admin interface to add and manage advertising on WordPress sites. Alas, it doesn’t work with the current version of WordPress 2.3.3 and hasn’t been updated since September 2007.

Since WpAdMentor was released by Stefan Holmberg’s under a GPL license, I’m releasing my bug fix version here:

http://tools.qualitynonsense.com/wpadmentor/wpadmentor.zip

Please add any questions, comments or feedback in the comments.

I have a confession, dear reader.

I didn’t always make money online to keep me in shoes. Once upon a time, I had “real jobs”.

I worked with some fantastically talented people, including Mr Blogjam and Ms Ladyshambles. I also worked with some real schmucks.

Many said schmucks worked for advertising agencies. Their common passions were overpriced Japanese trainers, permanent suspicious sniffles and an awful habit of talking at people. Mostly about themselves.

Very few of really understood the web, leaving me dazzled that buffoons could bluff with such success for so long. They’d use phrases like “thinking outside the box” or “blue sky thinking”, while I’d bite my tongue in lieu of explaining the irony of using cliches to illustrate creative thought.

These ad agency goons were not alone in failing to understand their medium of choice. At one startup, I proposed making bloggers the focus to launch a new service. The benefits of approaching bloggers were manifold: acres of free publicity, easy link building for web traffic and an army of potential early adopters to act as evangelists.

The downside? The CEO would need to clear a little time in his schedule to be interviewed by bloggers. He declined. Repeatedly. That year, said CEO cut cheques to the tune of £48k to a name PR firm. This generated one solitary, if substantial, write up.

That’s one piece of positive press in twelve whole months. From memory, this FT piece generated zero visible increase in user registrations.

So it’s always a pleasant surprise to see companies just *get it* when it comes to engaging bloggers. I can think of few more effective ways to build a buzz around a new brand.

Within hours of blogging about Swivel.com, I received an email from their CEO. He wanted to arrange a private demo to show me how Swivel could be used to analyze AdWords and AdSense data (watch this space).

I use myriad Google Alerts plus custom RSS feeds to track every mention of my websites and URLs on the web. I’m also playing with Track Engine as suggested by Eric Ward in his excellent Search Engine Land column.

What tools or methods do you use to help you build your brand in the blogosphere?