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Late last night Marshall Kirkpatrick published an epic post entitled Fail: Social News on World Events, Like Cuba. It is a great analysis of how web 2.0 news services covered a big mainstream news story. And the comments to the post are just as interesting. We actually got some kickback, with many commenters saying that the Castro news wasn't important enough for social news sites to cover in depth. That line of thought was started by the first commenter, Shannon Clark. So well done Shannon, for your efforts you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Here is Shannon's full comment:

Here's a test for Web 2.0. Cuba's Fidel Castro announced yesterday morning that he is resigning from his post as ruler of that communist country. What better way to celebrate the departure of an authoritarian dictator than to look at how the free flow of information in online social media provided coverage of the event? Or, depending on your take on Castro, what better way to celebrate a populist leader in the international fight for social justice and against imperialism than to look at the people-powered social media reaction?

Unfortunately, we could use some better results.

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.

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.