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This is guest post by Dan Zarrella, a social media marketing consultant. You can follow him on Twitter here.

While some people have said that Digg has begun to lose its relevancy since the recent algorithmic changes, I believe it still represents an incredibly rich resource for studying social media and how stories and links spread throughout the web community. Once a link "goes popular" and is listed on Digg's homepage it is seen by many and perhaps even a majority of web geeks. Very often these readers have their own blogs, and if they like a story they may blog about it or link to it. This is why many webmasters yearn to be Dugg -- not for the first wave of traffic, which is often substantial but hard to retain, but for the viral wave of traffic and links that comes as a result.

Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks did an analysis of current frontpage stories on digg, the popular social news site that started out as a tech competitor to Slashdot. Allen noted that now just 15% of frontpage stories are technology ones, which is a huge change from its roots. Slashdot meanwhile continues to focus exclusively on ultra-geeky topics.

I can add my own bit of analysis to Allen's. At the end of last week I did a check of which tech publishers were getting the most frontpages.

If you haven't heard of longtime Flash developer Paul Yanez, there's a good chance you've likely seen some of his work over the past few months. Yanez creates web-based flash media players that interact with the Internet's top video sites, and many of them have been written up on top blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, DownloadSquad, and NewTeeVee. His latest creation is an online media player for Hulu, which brings an Apple TV-esque experience to Hulu videos. Yanez has created a number of media players for various online video and image sharing properties which bring desktop-like functionality to browsing and playing files on those networks. But he has loftier aspirations for his project.

In post on his blog today, my friend Allen Stern takes issue with Digg winning the "Best User Generated Content Site" award at Friday night's Crunchies Awards. Allen, who provided the web with excellent live blogged coverage of the event based on the video stream describes the scene online after Digg's win: "The chat room went off on the selection simply because Digg is not a user-generated content site."

This is guest post by Dan Zarrella, a social media marketing consultant. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Building popularity on Twitter is about gaining followers, and the most fundamental and important concept to learn about building popularity is the idea that when you follow someone, they'll get an email about it and there's a good chance they'll follow you back. If that doesn't work, try responding with an @ to something they said. If they check their "replies" stream, they'll see it and possibly follow you.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

Digg.com recently had a survey pinned to the top of the site's front page, that hints at some of the new features we can expect from the next iteration of Digg. Let's take a more in-depth look at these features and how we would like them to be implemented.