'Net Features : digg

What's New in Digg v1?

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Once the most powerful “social” destination on the Web, Digg.com fell somewhat quickly from grace but after its recent sale/acquisition by Betaworks the site is focused on remaking the site and returning it to its former status of one of the best places to find read, and share what’s being talked about on the ‘Net. The question is whether it’s enough.

Visit Digg today and you’ll experience a clean, ad-free, image-friendly site which has done away with much (if not all) of the clutter of the former iteration. Digg has removed Newsrooms and the Newsbar (also known as the Diggbar) and reverted back to its original Newswire format which pivots around three “views” including Top Stories, Popular and Upcoming.

What’s most interesting is that Digg visitors will see that the voting “walls” have been torn down. In addition to actual diggs by users, Digg scores also now take into account Facebook shares and tweets. That is of particular importance of course and brings into focus the topic of moderation – a contentious issue for many former users.

In the coming months, Digg indicated it will release “network-based” personalization features (as it does in News.me), experiment with new commenting features, continue iterating the site for the mobile Web experience, and launch an API to enable developers to build products.

So, what do you think? Is this version of Digg an improvement over the last? And is it enough to compete (again)?

You might also be interested in WM’s recent “A Brief History of Digg” – check it out!

A Brief History of Digg

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 23:00:00 GMT

It was announced last week that Digg.com, the once powerful and influential social bookmarking service, has sold to BetaWorks for $500,000 U.S.

Whether you see it as a fall from grace, or are excited by the re-launch of the platform in early August 2012, exploring this history of what was once such an important property serves anyone in pursuit of Web success very, very well.

Below you'll find some of the highlights of Digg's history, but if we missed one, do let us know by commenting below.

Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetsky and Jay Adelson started Digg in 2004 with a $6,000 investment from Rose.

The name “Digg” was chosen because Dig.com was already registered by the Walt Disney Internet Group.

Launched in stealthy beta in April 2005. The site rapidly picks up steam in late 2005 starting in October.

Adelson took the position of CEO in February 2005.

In mid June 2006, with roughly 300,000 registered users, the site expanded to include different areas of content - not just technology and gaming.

Digg gains widespread attention by publicly exposing a 16-digit code that could be used to crack the anti-copying technology on HD-DVDs.

Digg opened their API to the public in April 2007, which allowed developers to write tools and apps based on Digg’s data.

In July 2007, Microsoft was selected as the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising in a three year agreement. The site was receiving 17 million visitors per month.

September 2008, Digg took a new 28.7 million round in funding, in the face of numerous clones including Yahoo's Buzz which lasted a brief 18 months.

Digg unveiled its Diggbar in April 2009. The tool kept all traffic on Digg, to the chagrin of publishers, and received a less than enthusiastic response from public.

In 2009 Digg integrated with Facebook Connect, which allowed users to sign in and participate with Digg posts through their Facebook accounts.

The company launched Digg Ads in August 2009, which were stories that were submitted by advertisers that also included Dig and Bury buttons.

In 2010 Digg launched an iPhone app and shortly after launched an Android app. While the iOS app is still available today, currently there is no Digg App for Android devices.

Adelson left Digg in April 2010, and shortly after Kevin Rose became CEO.

Digg Kills the DiggBar in April of 2010, and unbanned domains it had previously prevented from participating.

One month later in May 2010, Digg announced a 10 percent layoff. A few short days later, Website Magazine publishes "Digg is Deadd" to great fanfare... on Reddit.

Digg Went back to work, released a new Digg in August of 2010. Digg then hired a former Amazon Executive as CEO. (In September 2010, Rose was replaced as CEO by Matt Williams, who is a former general manager of consumer payments at Amazon.

On March 18, 2011, Rose resigned from his position at Digg. He currently works at Google Ventures.)

In October 2010, Digg slashed its staff by over one-third.

Digg, not done yet, launches a site overhaul and redesign in February 2011, following that with the release of Newsrooms in September 2011.

In July 2012, Digg was sold. According to various reports the Digg brand, website and technology were sold to Betaworks, while 15 staff members were transferred to the Washington Post's SocialCode project and a suite of patents were sold to LinkedIn.

Abandon Digg Day Update

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:10:00 GMT

Digg users apparently deserted the site in droves for Reddit yesterday according to data from Web analytics company StatCounter.

The firm’s research arm StatCounter Global Stats conducted a special analysis of Digg versus Reddit only and reports that, comparatively, Digg traffic to the StatCounter network of 3 million websites plummeted on Monday to 7.6% as opposed to Reddit’s 92.4%.

“The market share between Digg and Reddit tends to fluctuate but on Monday Digg fell to its lowest point compared to Reddit since our tracking began,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Users are voting with their mice following the launch of the new Digg site.”

Monday had been named as “Abandon Digg Day” by some users. “It wasn’t so much a ‘Black Monday’ for Digg as a ‘Redd Monday’,” added Cullen.

The data is based on 15 billion page views across the global StatCounter network of member sites. StatCounter, which provides free website traffic information, includes Social Media in its StatCounter Global Stats, a free online research tool for media, analysts, bloggers, researchers and members.

Digg Seeks Salvation

Mike Phillips — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:35:00 GMT

Several weeks ago, I proclaimed that Digg is Deadd. So, when I received an invite to alpha test the new Digg.com, I decided to conduct my own post-mortem. Here's what I found.

When first logging in to the new Digg.com, you are met with the call-to-action of "Find Profiles to Follow," sortable by category. Likely, many brands have yet to sign on, because the selection is relatively thin and still tilted heavily toward "tech." And they are almost all major brands or social media celebrities. Immediately, these accounts will have an edge on the new Digg.

You are then asked to import your friends and contacts from other websites including Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Noticing a trend?

The new Digg is all about who you know. Your home page will feature stories submitted by those you follow and on the right side of the page are stories voted on by your new Digg friends. Gone is the home page of the most Dugg stories by the public. That is, unless you click a button at top left where you can view the classic Digg home page.

Digg's attempt to personalize the site is in direct response to it's most often criticized component - the ability for the few, most powerful Digg members to manipulate what content was featured on the home page; therefore sending a deluge of traffic to the fortunate few and rendering the site all but useless to the rest. But even this attempt at personalization has a fatal flaw - it too, can be manipulated. In fact, it already is. The immediate recommendations of accounts to follow ensures that many users' personal feeds will be chock full of large publishers' stories. Naturally, the more followers an account has, the more votes their stories will receive. And it gets worse. The new Digg allows RSS feeds to be imported. So, whenever a publisher posts new content to their feed, it will appear on Digg in your stream. Follow CNN and you can expect your "personal" feed to quickly become crowded, leaving less room for those personalized stories.

Of course, your choice of who to follow is just that - your choice. However, the basic problem of "who you know" (or don't know) is still prevalent on the new site. The most active and best networkers are the ones who will benefit the most. In other words, spend an inordinate amount of time with the site and you might see some benefits. Which presents yet another choice ...

For my money (and time) Digg is simply Done. I never received the value commensurate with the time I spent on the site in the first place. And I don't see anything new or innovative that makes me think anything will change. Since leaving Digg over a year ago, my efforts have been rewarded in other places - like Facebook, Twitter and developing my e-mail subscriber base. These are my "real" friends. These are the people with whom I have developed a meaningful relationship. And because they have committed to me, I will not abandon them in pursuit of failed promises of the past.

Digg Announces API Enhancements for Developers

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:40:00 GMT

A very notable advance in social search pretty much flew completely under the radar last week.

Social powerhouse Digg announced several important enhancements to their API which will make it easier for developers to build applications using Digg data. Much of the data and analytics surrounding Digg content will be enhanced on this revision of the API.

Digg has made available a search endpoint which provides developers the ability to find specific content on Digg. Developers will also be able to use some advanced shortcuts, common search tricks, and search by source (domain). More information is available on the Search API documentation.

A series of related stories endpointss has also been added. Developers will be able to build application which leverage Digg's related stories capabilities to, for example, find stories similar diggers have dugg. Another example might be returning stories with similar keywords. Digg most notably in my opinion has included an endpoint for favorites on Digg, which is a great way to determine which stories people find exceptional in some manner.

Finally, Digg has also made a subtle change to its API license, removing most of the commercial limitations which should give developers more control over the applications they create using the Digg API, with full ownership, i.e. no fees - hooray!

Digg Shakes Up the Advertising Game

Mike Phillips — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:14:00 GMT

Digg just took online ads - particularly social advertising - to a whole new level. Advertisements will soon be integrated into regular Digg content (the 'river'), appearing similar to a regular submission. And, just like Digg submissions, the ads can be voted up or down by users. From the Digg blog:

"Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system."

The immediate question is whether Digg users will accept this kind of advertising. If there's a revolt, look for users to vote down every ad they see, driving advertisers out and causing a collapse of the entire advertising model. And it's not difficult for a bloc of Digg users to have a major impact on voting. Considering the Digg audience, it won't be hard for them to tell the difference between an ad and a regular post - meaning votes for ads will be explicit, not confused for regular content. Will users take the time and effort to vote on advertising?

If it works, it's a very attractive prospect for advertisers. It also carries a huge incentive and onus for the advertiser to create compelling ads. Garden-variety ads won't survive in this space - they must be entertaining, informative or a mix of both to garner votes and acceptance. Headlines will be critically important as well - many Digg stories are voted up or down without the user ever clicking-through or reading the story.

Digg plans to start rolling out ads within a couple of months or so. This will get plenty of attention, as it should. It's innovative in a space that typically has problems monetizing content. Looking at the comments on Digg about this news, it varies. However there's no shortage of Digg users who find this interesting and not at all off-putting.

This represents one of the strongest attempts to blur the line between user-generated content and advertising in a social environment. If successful, it certainly won't be the last. If it fails, social networking monetization will take a step backward. Digg, obviously, has the most to lose. It also goes to show that these networks must make money, and users must suffer through advertising mixed with their "personal" experiences. It's not hard to imagine that if experiments such as this continue to fail, users might be forced into a paid model of social networking, or at least have the choice of ad-free networking, at a premium.

The State of Content Submission Sites

Mike Phillips — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:14:00 GMT

Content submission sites can garner a fair amount of traffic for a website. So it's good to know where your content stands the best chance of reaching the widest audience. Compete.com has returned new traffic results for March 2009, and the numbers suggest that most of these sites are doing extremely well, meaning they are still viable - if not essential - places to market brands, products and services. Of course the first focus should always be on your company, but you will want to take advantage of free promotional services.

Digg.com remains strong, getting more than 36 million visits per month, according to Compete. For the year, traffic at Digg is up 71.5 percent. The attractive part of Digg is that it is widely used, both in and outside of the Web professional industry, meaning that you have a good chance of making an impact with consumers, not just fellow marketers. The down side is that the very structure of Digg caters to those with connections and those who know how to make the system work for them. Otherwise Digg can take a lot of effort and time to be truly effective.

Twitter is far and away the fastest growing network online, both in terms of traffic and overall industry buzz. The site is up to 14 million uniques per month, up from 8 million last month (a 76 percent increase) and up more than 1,200 percent this year. There's no denying that Twitter is an important place to submit content, or at least have a presence. Be sure to take advantage of URL shortening services like bitl.y, cli.gs, or budurl to track how (and if) your content spreads through Twitter.

Then there are the rest. There are may niche content submission sites and some of them may hold real value, depending on your industry or focus. But for general purposes it makes sense to focus on those with the widest reach. Below is a chart from Compete.com analyzing five popular submission sites and their current traffic data: Newsvine, Propeller, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Reddit. (Article continues below)

Reddit holds the overall edge, in both traffic numbers and growth, closely followed by StumbleUpon. It's also interesting to see that Reddit has a very steady growth pattern, usually indicating a site with staying power. Also note that all but one of these services (Propeller) is experiencing growth. And while the numbers of any of these sites might suggest it's simply not worth the effort in comparison to Digg or Twitter, it could be argued that while these sites are growing, now is a good time to get involved and stake your claim.

It should also be noted that StumbleUpon, while used as a submission site by many, is not necessarily intended to be a content submission site. It might fall under the category of content discovery. And, for that matter, Delicious.com could fall into that category as well. Delicious had over 1.8 million unique visits in March, a 13 percent boost from February 2009.

Submitting content to these sites and establishing a reputable presence (including networking and making influential friends) can take an extraordinary amount of time. Sometimes too much to be worth the return. Therefore, it's always important to use your analytics to closely monitor the returns you are getting for your efforts. If you see that site visits from one particular network are resulting in high bounce rates, limited time-on-site or any other factor detrimental to your overall goals, don't be afraid to jump ship. Or find the network(s) with the highest return toward your goals and focus on those instead.

reddit Opens Up, Allows Full Customization

Mike Phillips — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:28:00 GMT

While larger voting sites such as Digg and recently-released Yahoo Buzz keep their properties closely guarded, Reddit is taking the exact opposite approach, hoping to capitalize on its 300 percent growth since May.

Taking dead aim at its competitors, reddit now allows users - and publishers - to fully customize their own reddit communities. You can modify the CSS and use custom CNAMEs. Style the community, the logos, and point your own domain to your new, custom community. This could be a fantastic way to really engage your site visitors and have them engage with your site and your brand - even if you have to endure some third-party advertising on your custom voting site.

Depending on the success of the reddit experiment, we could see many more social networking/voting sites start to open up to private use. Revenue shares, third-party app inclusion ... Mixx, are you listening?

As an extra bonus to get started, reddit is running a contest for custom communities - grow the largest audience in one month and get a free Macbook Air.

The Complete Publisher's Guide to Yahoo Buzz

Mike Phillips — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:35:00 GMT

Yahoo Buzz has opened up to all publishers, meaning that - like it or not - you need to get involved. The big bonus for publishers is not in getting a few thousand hits at a time, but millions. Yahoo Buzz gives you the opportunity to get your story - your website - on the front page of Yahoo. Whether for 10 minutes or 10 hours, that kind of exposure will garner significant traffic and could make a huge impact on your online enterprise.

How it Works

You submit stories, videos or photos and the public buzzes (votes) them to the top. The top buzzed stories can appear on Yahoo's home page. However, it's not totally automated. While Buzz is determined by voters (among other factors) and not editors, Yahoo editors use Buzz to help determine what's worthy of a cover story on the home page. According to the website, "We also have members of our team comb through all the top content on Yahoo! Buzz and select items to appear on the Yahoo! homepage."

Submitting

Before you do anything, make sure your website can handle a huge spike in traffic, just in case. And think about placing Buzz buttons in your posts so those viewing your story elsewhere can buzz it. The larger buttons will probably work best, especially those with vote numbers if you get significant views. Consider placing one at the top and one at the bottom to give your readers more chances to buzz your story. There are many to choose from and even some custom options. You can find the buttons by clicking the link "Publishers: Get your content on Buzz!" under the submit button.

On the right side of the home page you will find the button to submit. Next, enter your story URL, title and a short description. Select your category and media type (text, video or photo) and click "preview." Here, look over your submission carefully, as you cannot edit the post after submitting. Enter one of those wonderful captcha codes and click submit. And this is what you will see:

Sharing

Now you need to make sure your story gets some attention. Click the "Send" button to open a window where you can enter email addresses to send the story. Keep in mind that it's coming from whatever Yahoo ID you are currently logged in with, and that corresponding email address is what the recipient is going to see. So you might consider setting up a corporate Yahoo account (if you don't have one already) and using that for submissions. This way, your brand will appear every time you submit and every time you email. The email recipient receives your personal message (if any), title of the article and a link - unfortunately a very, very long link. After clicking the link, they get the page with your story, including three different places/opportunities to navigate to your website.

Of course, you don't want to swamp people with emails all the time, but there appears to be a serious benefit. According to the Buzz website, "The Web's most remarkable stories, determined by people like you. Stories are ranked based on your votes, emails, and searches." So, the more friends that forward your email to others, the more likely it's going to get buzzed and move that much closer to Yahoo's home page. And Yahoo must be paying attention to the number of times a story is emailed.

You can also click the "Share" button to submit your story to Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Propeller, Digg and Facebook. Take advantage of that. And don't be afraid to promote your story and ask for votes. In fact, Yahoo encourages it: "Tell your visitors what Yahoo! Buzz is and encourage them to vote for your stories (and send them to friends)."

Some Tips

Like anything social, get active. You need to submit several different types of stories and not only your own. Yahoo is pretty mum on the details, but you can be sure that like Digg, StumbleUpon or Mixx, the more diversified and active you are, the better chance of exposure for your submissions.

There is not a "friend" feature on Yahoo Buzz yet, but that will likely happen. According to the website, "In the 'beta' version of Yahoo! Buzz, we do not yet ways for you to connect with other Buzz users. Please stay tuned over the coming months as we layer in more features." By being active, you'll gain a reputation with Buzz. If/When a friends feature is added, you'll want to have some clout - others will seek you out to befriend you and begin the whole process of building communities - just like on Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx and other social sites.

Be vigilant and patient. As you can imagine, the stories at the top of Buzz and those that appear on the home page of Yahoo are overwhelmingly from big-time sources like CNN, The New York Times, Time.com and even Yahoo itself. Yahoo wants to make sure that the stories reaching their home page are reputable, well-written and worthy.

In fact, you'll notice that on the Buzz home page the stories with the most activity tend to have accompanying images - that includes ALL of the stories on the rotating top banner, "Just Added." According to the publisher FAQs, "Yahoo! Buzz currently partners with certain publishers, and as part of this partnership we are able to receive and display their images on Buzz. We will reach out to additional publishers whose content is doing well on Buzz, and invite them to do the same." No word if Yahoo will require those publishers to use Yahoo Publishers Network (YPN) instead of AdSense, like the early publishers on Buzz were required to do.

If your aim is to reach the Yahoo home page - and that's really the ultimate goal here - in addition to following these tips, be careful not to submit duplicate content. Just like it can hurt your reputation on sites like Digg, it's likely the same can be said for Buzz. It's early and you'll want to get in good with Yahoo right now. Submitting duplicate content may weaken your standing in this developing community.

Also see The Complete User's Guide to Yahoo Buzz.

Yahoo Buzz Opens to All Publishers

Mike Phillips — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:55:00 GMT

It's official, Yahoo's Digg-style Buzz is now open to all publishers. Unlike Digg, one of the main features of Buzz is to push content to the home Yahoo page - a chance for publishers to gain a monumental amount of attention and traffic. In addition, Buzz's algorithms take into account search engine popularity (so it takes a little more than voters gaming the system) and there's a push to feed Buzz stories into users' personalized Yahoo (my.yahoo.com) pages - another good source of significant attention. Through Buzz, after submitting you will also be able to share content through Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook and Propeller.

Simply put, Buzz cannot be ignored. Publishers have a big opportunity to hit an enormous audience - far, far beyond Digg or any other single bookmarking service. Like anything else, the earlier you start, the better.

Time to Start Mixxing

Mike Phillips — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:51:00 GMT

Social news aggregator and Digg competitor Mixx.com has announced the launch of their API, allowing developers to get their hands dirty creating new applications. And that means more attention and more traffic for Mixx and those who leverage the site to their advantage.

The API will allow items to be viewed, submitted and commented on from any other site across the Web. Already, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times includes buttons on stories to submit to Mixx and many other large media sites are beginning to follow suit.

Mixx does not see anywhere near the traffic as Digg, but a look at some data shows they are playing a mean game of catch-up. Compete shows traffic booming - soon after launch, in September 2007 Mixx saw about 30,000 unique visitors, compared to over 180,000 in March 2008. In short, quick innovation, fast uptake and the attention of top developers should be enough to convince anyone to start using Mixx in their marketing plans.