Apparently out there on the internet, unbeknownst to me, there are entire sites dedicated to mashups. “Mashup” of course is one of those words people love to hate, but for better or worse it is attached to anything on the internet that uses an api and is remotely cool. I guess DiggKiller qualifies. In the past few days, I’ve been selected as a “Mashup of the Day” on two different sites. The first is programmableweb.com. I found out about this by checking the referrer traffic for my site and noticing the domain, and checking it out. The site must not have that much traffic, because I never heard of it before and they only forwarded me about 60 hits. Also, there are currently no “comments” on the page, a good indicator of anemic traffic.

The second site looked a little more credible. It’s mashupawards.com and I was notified of my award through an email (which means they actually had to visit the site, read my little blurb at the bottom and find my email address). They even urged me to choose a cool badge to display on my site, like this one:

At first I thought this was a lame excuse to get more traffic to a second-rate site, by picking a cool thing everyday and then linking back to their site with these awards. It’s a classic technique to increase traffic and google ranking. But then I noticed that the site actually looks pretty badass, and they don’t have a single advertisement on it. How to they make money? Who knows.

I guess the thing that’s truly amazing is that in the land of web 2.0, sites exist that give out awards every day that are HAND PICKED by the site’s creators, instead of being automagically chosen by user voting and complex promotion algorithms. It’s refreshing to see some people kickin’ it old school, and to me, kind of gives these awards more value. I just remembered fuzzwich does that too. Maybe it’s a new wave of retro-humanized editorial voting systems?  Maybe I just spend too much time on digg.

This is kinda cool. My game DiggKiller is now considered a “hot new game” on Kongregate, and thusly appears on their front page. See if you can find it:

Good shit, if you haven’t played it yet do it!

Kongregate is a pretty sick flash games community where a bunch of people play a bunch of flash games. I just submitted DiggKiller to it, now that the digg-craze has died down a bit, I’m reaching a new audience. Plus they share their ad revenue with me. YAY! Doesn’t look too bad, despite being scrunched a little smaller than the original size. Had to finagle some of the code to get it to work, and for some reason, the hi scores throw security errors when they try to load, despite the sounds, and the digg stories loading from offsite. Whatever. It’s cool.

Check it out on Kongregate

or Play it on my site (hi scores work)

If you go to digg.com RIGHT NOW, you’ll see this on the top 10 sidebar:

.. that is all.

So I’m pretty sure my game has officially “blown up” on digg. Right now it’s getting close to 800 diggs and rising quickly. The cool part about this is.. since the game is a popular gaming story, it shows up in the game itself! And people have caught on to cheating and have starting posting “fuck suck colbert environment epic kevin rose ipod” (these are the keywords that trigger powerups) comments all over the place on digg to give themselves a helping hand when they play. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty cool to be blasting away at a story in my game that IS the game.. it’s kind of like, the matrix or something. No, not really. Image below:

..and when I kill it, I get every powerup in the game simultaneously!!.. truly epic.

If you haven’t played yet, click to play!!

This is what I’ve been working on for awhile. It’s a sick 2D space shooter that implements the digg api. You shoot at enemies that increase in difficulty as they increase in diggs, and you collect comments from the stories that are scanned for keywords to give you powerups. It’s pretty cool, you should play it!

Click Here to Play it!