UPDATE JULY 2ND: Congratulations to bigtaurus (Big John - The Online Info Guy) who won the June link giveaway.

Would you like to have a text link to your site on PlugIM for a month? All you need to do is participate in the PlugIM community during the month of June and then at the end of the month we will have a drawing to pick the winner. The winner’s text link will be displayed on PlugIM for the entire month of July. The more you participate, the more entries you get in the drawing which increases your odds of winning. Here’s how to get entries in the drawing:

• Every comment posted: 1 entry

So if you comment once on 10 different stories in June you’ll have 10 entries in the drawing. Note: these are comments posted in response to stories on PlugIM. Not story submissions.

Why are comments the only way to receive entries? Two reasons: most importantly I’m trying to encourage you all to communicate more. PlugIM isn’t only for posting links, it’s also for discussion around the stories that are submitted. The second reason is help break in the new story subscription mod that we just finished implementing earlier this month. Using this mod, it will be a lot easier to know when someone comments on one of your stories which will make it easier to have ongoing conversations. My personal request: please don’t post junk comments on every story such as “Wow, that’s really cool” or “Awesome info, thanks for sharing!” While these comments may in fact be true, the goal of this giveaway isn’t to encourage spamming, it’s to encourage constructive participation. I have no easy way of policing this, so I ask that everyone play responsibly.

Prize details:

• 1 Month Front and Center on 20,000+ Pages of PlugIM.com
• Your Choice of Anchor Text
• Direct Link – No nofollow tag – No redirects
• Google PR 5 – Alexa Rank 16,691
• $72 Value! (Current package price through Text-Link-Ads)

Giveaway guidelines:

• No entries will be awarded for comments that are deleted
• The winner’s text link will be displayed during the month of July
• Text links may not promote gambling, alcohol or tobacco, firearms, adult sites, gambling sites, etc.

If you don’t win, or don’t want to wait to get your link on PlugIM, you can purchase one through Text-Link-Ads. If you’ve never used Text-Link-Ads before, clicking on this link will get you $100 off. (Sorry, currently sold out.)

One thing that’s always bothered me about posting stories to sites like Digg is that there’s no easy way to keep track of who’s commenting on your posts. Often times when I post something, I’ll end up leaving the story open in a browser window and refresh it periodically throughout the day to see if there are any new comments. Usually I’ll check it a couple times the day I post it and then rarely ever go back to see if anyone’s posted anything new.

One of the most popular plugins for WordPress is the subscription plugin where you can subscribe to a post and automatically receive email notifications any time someone comments on the post. I use it all the time and it saves me a ton of time. It’s great for when you ask the author a question and don’t want to keep checking back to see if they’ve posted a response yet.

To me it seemed like a no-brainer to add subscription capability to PlugIM and I’m happy to announce it has finally arrived! Earlier this week we wrapped up our testing round and now the PlugIM subscription notification system is in place. You can easily subscribe to any story on PlugIM and you’ll receive an email any time anyone comments on the stories you’ve subscribed to.

There are a couple different ways to subscribe to stories. Every story has a new ‘subscribe’ button under the comment box. Simply click the button to subscribe to the story, you don’t even need to submit a comment. The button uses AJAX to change from a subscribe button to an unsubscribe button so just click it again later if you wish to unsubscribe from the story. The other way to subscribe to stories is to use the automatic story subscription options located in your profile. You can choose to automatically subscribe to every story you post on PlugIM which is a nice easy way to keep track of your own stories. Also you can choose to automatically subscribe to all stories you comment on. Both options are on by default.

I hope you all find this modification useful and I hope it encourages you all to comment more than you do now because that was the driving force behind making the modification. If you have any questions, find any issues or have any suggestions, just post a comment here to let me know.