Huffington Post: Google's Favorite News Content Farm
Aaron Wall has posted a
screenshot of an Huffington Post article that is only tweet about a news link but is ranking on top of Google for that news topic.
Google has tried to clamp down on content farms full of 'thin content' with its
Farmer Update. How about a clampdown on '
thin news rewriters' polluting much of Google News and others SERPs?
Labels: google, social news
Rethinking General Purpose Social News Websites
The latest from Digg's downfall - Digg is apparently trying to get inactive users to start using the site. “
Come Alive On Digg", the
email from Digg reportedly says. Now, why would users, this writer included, do that?
1. Digg as a source of traffic: Even if I were to believe that the bury brigades are really buried on Digg, the window of opportunity (for making the home page) for small publishers is very, very small, what with all that constant river of hundreds of copycat stories in queue.
2. Digg as a town hall: Basically, a social news website is a place for discussions centered around submitted news links. Think of Digg as a giant (spammy) blog network, where the comments are not quite of the quality of Slashdot. (also see
Twitter is a giant blog) A noisy town hall, where nothing important gets done or said, is of no use to anyone.
3. Digg as a 'too' general purpose social news site: Reddit has its many sub-reddits. Hacker News is devoted to news for and about tech entrepreneurs. Slashdot has the technology angle covered pretty well. The lesson from these successful social news sites is, Digg needs focus. Digg needs categories. Digg also needs editors/'owners' for these categories.
4. Digg as a social network: This is scourge of social media, every website wants to be everything. I have trouble updating Facebook, as it is. From my past experience, the dominant form of social groupings on Digg tend to be of webmasters and marketers trying to scam the system.
As for the question, will I go back to Digg? I don't think so.
Labels: Digg, social news
How Social News Can Go Bad: Right-wing Censor Cabal on Digg.com
Now, we all know that to make your news site work, you must take a distinct editorial view (avoiding the 'view from nowhere' approach). But, what can you do if a big, very big social news site lets a right-wing cabal flourish? That appears to be the new Digg story.
Digg is no longer in the forefront of social news sharing, despite the huge traffic (25 million page views per month), and having let sites such as Huffington Post (curated liberal news), Reddit ('Cool' news stories & the many sub-reddits), Hacker News (News for Startups and Entrepreneurs), Fark (highly readable, curated news stories, with punchy headlines) and of course Slashdot (Tech stories & a knowledgeable commenting crowd) get ahead. There is just no editorial focus on Digg, formal or semi-formal. As a result, anything goes. Really. Including censorship on a huge scale.
A writer on Alternet
exposes the shenanigans of a group of conservative-minded Digg users who manage to
search and bury articles from 'liberal' news sites , using multiple accounts, IP proxies (so that they can register more accounts),
upvote padding (of stories with conservative angle) and more.
These users number around 100, they have a Yahoo Group called
Digg Patriots (DP), and have a companion site at coRanks. They use the Group and other online resources to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites.
Is it social news? It may be or or it isn't. I leave that up to you. But I sure do think if Digg wants to be known as a news site for conservative news, it should say so and that would be the end of it. That would guide users who are sharing 'liberal news' to stay away and go elsewhere. But Digg wouldn't want the traffic to go away. It wants to have the best of both worlds, pardon the cliche.
P.S.: I might point out that Alternet promote liberal causes
Related:
Labels: Digg, social news
How to fix Digg?
Digg revolutionized Social News Sharing. But, somewhere down the line, the great Digg dream declined. The traffic is there but the quality is hardly
monetizable.
Earlier we thought Digg might eclipse Slashdot. Six years onwards, the quality of conversation on Digg is still nowhere Slashdot. To be fair to Digg, few online conversation spots are as intelligent as Slashdot.
Now, Kevin Rose is desperately trying to inject fresh life into Digg. However, people have been quick to point out that merely copying from other sites is not the way forward. Alexis Ohanioan, co-founder of Reddit.com (he sold the site to Condenast and moved on) says about Rose's
new plan,
An open letter to Kevin Rose: this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
I think one way Digg can get its act together is to cut down on expenses, social news doesn't require millions in salaries.
With a smaller team in place, there will less pressure on Rose to bring in the money, and then Digg can implement the top 100 users leaderboard openly, putting some checks and balances against abuse, and making the top 100 act more like the Techmeme leaderboard, as well as Top 100 Digg members acting as
topic editors.
That is what I would have done.
Relate Mediavidea stories on Digg:Why Digg needs editors Part 2 Labels: Digg, social news
Why Digg needs editors - Part 2
I still think Digg would be a better resource for all of us who are looking for
'news with the context'/the big picture.
I found the above image
'If Digg were a newspaper' on the Shortformblog blog.
Yes, Digg needs editors. Editors to curate what goes on to topic-specific front pages. The traffic is huge, the comments are getting better and at times they inform me on issues I previously knew little about.
In case of some topics, Digg is approaching Slashdot like quality, but then we have to remember that Slashdot has moderation, while Digg has stupid bury brigades. If you want to deal with spammers, trolls, duplicate content, do it properly and openly, not firing from free-ranging cabals.
BTW, did you know the New York Times has a whole department moderating the comments?
Related stories about Digg on this blogDigg in print?Creating a Digg about DiggsLoving Digg, why?Getting on top of Digg is out, becoming a top digger is inLabels: Digg, social news
The Dirty Dozen at Digg?
Came across this analysis which says that while Digg is becoming more mainstream, the number of sites that enjoy regular home page positions on the site is shrinking. There are reportedly 12 sites that are lucky to have their article grace Digg's home page on a regular basis.
These dirty (or, lucky - depends on who's talking)
12 sites are:
Ars Technica
Gizmodo
Engadget
Torrentfreak
Techcrunch
Valleywag
ReadWriteWeb
Mashable
Gigaom
VentureBeat
CenterNetworks
I propose we leave all the hypocrisy behind and build ourselves a "Originalsignal.com+Popurls.com" type page with feeds for all these 12 sites.
Add the popular sites on Techmeme.com as well.
Do not share a tear for social news.
Labels: Digg, social news, techmeme
Are Curated news links the next big thing?
Scott Carp's initiative
Publish2 is perhaps a harbinger of the shift in the social bookmarking/social news business where the likes of Digg and Reddit have long ruled. Digg mobs, Reddit spammers, Digg Bury Brigades have become part of the New Media Lexicon.
While Digg boasts of Pro-Ron Paul Diggers, Reddit is heavily pro-Obama and as Obama threatens to take pole position in the Democratic Party primaries, Diggers are shifting to Obama. No one is 'working' for Hillary, but that is another story.
The point is:
Journalists should have more activity in Online Social News bookmarking and online news will be better for it. Bias, there is will be, but it will be offset by
better categorization.
I am waiting for the day when I see tags like this:Pro ObamaPro HillaryScott writes about the
innovative things he and his journalist friends are doing with Publish2.
I wrote about the possibility of having
Digg run by journalists.
Is Publish2 just such as thing?
Labels: Digg, news 2.0, social news
The 100 most powerful people on the Internet in 2007
The most powerful people on the internet are the top users of social media sites. Traditionally, the top people on the web can be as banal as the latest from Forbes (
example), the big daddy of list making sites.
Seeing that useless list, my first reaction was to come up with a fresh version of the
People’s Choice List I came up with back in January but I think the earlier list is still relevant and then I recalled that getting on top of sites such as Digg or becoming a top digg/reddit/stumbleupon user was covered more by bloggers than many other topics.
If Time magazine so arrogantly anointed 2006 as the Year of ‘You’, it would not be outlandish for you to announce
2007 as the year of social news site users.For a moment, I propose we do not get into debates over whether having as many friends on Digg is the future of online news, where
Gtalk is all you need to put a story on Digg’s front page.
Let us instead celebrate all those high school students, the enterprising housewive, the ‘soon-out-of-college-must-make-some-name-using- cheap- broadband- and- ample- free-time’ guy with a plan, the hacker who has no job, the wannabe Arrington, the SEO upstart, the SMM huckster, part-time workers of the world, the whacked-out-of-his-mind hack at that big corporation, the store owner (where few shop anyway), the overeager Samaritan happy to help out the new UGC site's owner who promised him top billing (or a job in the future), the college student (mostly film and arts majors), and the comment whores who take over entire commenting below a post of their fancy.Obviously, FREE TIME is all that you need to join this most illustrious band of people who have collectively managed to invoke awe, fear and loathing of internet publishers everywhere, forcing them to modify their content to suit their predominantly libertarian, righteous, male, pro-Ron Paul, voyeur tastes.
These guys have set the trend for names that people will surely have by the time Battlestar Galactica becomes a reality:
CliffofOsaka, Supernova17 (a great age indeed for doing great things, huh?), Koregaonpark (19 year old kid), Stoners, dirtyfratboy…If you get your high from this
‘I vote you up, you vote me up’ frenzy, I suppose you will be panting with anticipation about who these most powerful users, the crème-de-la-crème are.
Choose from the people in the lists below and make up your own 100
The Top 1000 Digg UsersTop Users of StumbleUpon(site created by a
Top Digg User Muhammad Saleem who is a good writer as well. Another notable top social news participant is David Cohn.
Top 50 Niche Social Media sites and their Top UsersP.S.Reddit.com is a worthy site but I couldn’t find a list of top users, which anyway can be useless because there are no proper profile pages and I suspect that top journalists from Wired Magazine (which owns Reddit) may be top users of Reddit as well, considering the
high-falutin news coverage on the site.
Users of Slahdot.org have not been taken into consideration – too refined for my taste.
Related ReadingSocial Media Websites in Illustrated FormNice cartoons to illustrate the differences b/w the different social news sites
Wizards of Buzz (great WSJ article from February)Some Shameless Self promotion: Posts I wrote about the topic this yearGetting on top of Digg is out, becoming a top Digg user is in A Short analysis of content on top social news sitesTop 25 People Online, People's ChoiceLabels: Digg, reddit, social news, top 10, trends
Participant Generated Content vs. User Generated Content
PGC or UGC? Which one will it be? To tell you the truth, I have been in this blog business for more than years now and I still can’t get a hang of the terminology.
Are blogs UGC? (Nope) Are Comments UGC? (Yes) …
So, it comes to pass that Robert Scoble, supposed purveyor of cool web tools sporting a freshly minted career along the lines of ‘David Frost meets Jay Leno kind of interviewer/chat show’ decides to write a useful blog post for a change, revealing with a
purposefully accidental flourish that he will soon be leaving Podtech, where he did interviews and other stuff, for FastCompany where he will continue to explore new stuff in video.
Scoble gives out some insights into the Online Video Business and if you like
Jaywalking on the Tonight Show, Smile, you are on Candid Camera, and similar
public involving shows and if you are into
recording rock concerts and other public events on your cell phone and if you dig Road Movies, you will understand where Scoble is heading.
Pointing to sites like Digg.com, Youtube.com, Scoble goes on to say this:
I’m tired of getting used by companies who just use and use and use without giving me anything in return.
… I actually love it when Christopher Coulter calls it “loser generated media.”
Digg users, take note.
But, I still don’t see whether ‘Participant Generated Media’ will make the participants rich.
Can PDC make participants make participants happy? Yes.
But, aren’t Youtube and its clones making from PGC?
Some things never change. Only the terminology does.
Labels: Digg, online video, social news, User generated Content, youtube
Are aggregators like Techmeme making us dumb?
The dumbing down of the blogosphere is already under way. General purpose, mass-led aggregators like Digg are no better than a young techie male's’ version of a supermarket tabloid. Reddit started strong with politics but is not fast going under with Ron Paul fans and NSFW pics. Del.icio.us, a bookmarking tool is better but, as is the case with all aggregators, searching for the best in the latest takes effort.
Google News does not give you great news. Essays and opinions are sparse and most headlines are pure pile ons.
Speaking about
pile ons, I was pretty enthusiastic when Gabe Reviera’s Techmeme came on the scene, promising to point to the crème-de-la crème of online tech writing (Techmeme, aka Memeorandum has its sister sites for celebs, politics and sports). For a while it was convenient reading the latest deep think about technology and business.
Then I started writing for my own blog in October 2006 and at first I was thrilled to notice 4-5 (never more) footfalls from Techmeme and then I discovered that because I had inadvertently chosen a link already present on Techmeme and had taken time to comment, I think it was a post by Om Malik, that the Gabe Rivera’s algorithm determined that I was ‘someone’ and I must say it wasn’t flattering.
The first response of any budding blogger would have been to comment and link to Techmeme regulars like crazy but I soon found that barring a few writers, most of the stuff on Techmeme was, well, drivel – product launches, service improvements, A-listers grappling with each others for no other reason than “look at me! I am important!”.
These days, I find few new things to write about. The idea of commenting on Big Bloggers to garner attention never appealed to me and I am not proud that I did this for the first few months while blogging.
Besides, I have less times to
'opine'.
During times that the Valley deems to be earth-shattering, iPhone launch, Facebook, earnings report for the big three, you saw nothing but
pile ons – a glorified version of Google news.
The point is I found less valuable stuff to read on Techmeme than in my own RSS reader. It is a playground for a select few, among whom people who do provide insight can be counted on my left hand fingers. Among the regulars on Techmeme, people have started painting them as being in the bed with PR people.
Todd Cochrane writes about
how they are gaming the whole elite blogger concept :
…a recent post on TechCrunch.com achieved a top listing on TechMeme.com only after 3 other sites had linked in to the story. While I watched that story grow to have nearly 25 sites linking to it the long tail effect is a Public Relations Managers dream.
You have an “A” list site like TechCrunch that rarely writes a negative review, you then have a auxiliary base of 25–100 blogs that link to the same review as their sourced material. Than Google comes around and indexes all the sites.
What you have just achieved is a #1 spot in the Google Search Results for an article on a product update or new site release. While this is not PayPerPost it is definitely “Public Relations Gaming” of the Tech Blogging community.
So,
can there be a possibility that some so-called A-listers have made deals with SEOs and PR people? I don’t know but I support Todd’s contention that we should move back to our RSS readers for a better understanding of the news.
It is better to have a lot of good essayists and analysts (Jupiter Research, Kelsey Group) in your RSS reader.
If you can’t get a good night’s sleep without a dose from the aggregators, may I suggest popurls.com (better variety – Metafilter, Slashdot, digg, etc.) or your choice of from Origianlsignal’s bouquets of sources?
And for all you Techmeme fans, stop linking to Techmeme regulars. As it is, there is no way you are going to earn a living from deep think blogging and that means
you must not let others (A-listers and PR people) benefit from your labors as well.
A short guide to the perplexed to differentiate from the good and bad on Techmeme:The good onesNick Carr, Dave Winer, Shirky, Cringely
Tech BusinessGiga Om, Valleywag, Center Networks, Techdirt, Slashdot
The attention whores/self promotersCalacanis, Scoble
The Banal (aka Press Release/pay per post)Techcrunch, Product news
The Facebook GangDave Mcclure, NYT (and hordes of desperate application developers)
Labels: news aggregators, social news, techcrunch, techmeme
The Future of news: Read more, write more, partner more
As was expected, yet another attempt from mainstream media to define and analyze the boom in user-generated news was hotly debated and trashed in equal measure on blogs and news sites.
Project in Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)
analyzed headlines on social news sites (Digg, Reddit, Deli.cio.us) comparing them with mainstream media headlines.
The only useful thing I found was that people forwarded ‘How To’ lists and advice more than other story types. The rest of the findings were along expected lines:
- The increasingly fragmented online readership
- Frontpages of MSM and Social News sites rarely match: since both have different editorial setups. Editors rule on MSM sites and the crowd is supreme on social sites.
Not wanting to comment on the usual outrage of bloggers , I have three takes on this:
1. Those who like to read love the new setup
Read the best of mainstream media and your favorite bloggers. Never before did I have so much data on any given issue at hand. Now, I can read the NYT and Guardian’s take on Hillary vs Obama and then look at how bloggers and members of Digg and Reddit have aligned themselves on the issue.
Given the abundance of available information, the modern editors’ bias is easily brought into focus now than before.
Now, the reader can ask the editor ‘if you knew A was B, why did you say that…?
2. The power of comments, link forwarding and bored peopleSocial News is driven by the hordes of bored workers in offices and in dorms everywhere, who submit links, forward links and comment their hearts out on the social news sites.
I believe comments on news items on social sites are richer than the news items themselves.
Among news anization, Guardian’s
Comment is Free is a worthy attempt and I never miss reading the comments below any readable Guardian column.
3. Let’s work togetherThat’s what owners/editors at established news organizations should be telling to social news sites, bloggers, commentators and other enthusiastic participants, making it possible, and profitable, to both parties to include each other’s content in their offerings.
For your consideration:
A: Local paper + best of local bloggersB: Local paper’s shoddy, mostly fluffy tech coverage and what bloggers think about Apple’s iPhone tactics and why doesn’t Apple do something about the battery?C: New York Times plus Best of Digg and Del.icio.usRather than bicker about what is news, what is not, or whether bloggers are useful or whether social media is making us dumb, let work together and create
'news that is fit to comment and act upon?' (Sorry, NYT)
Labels: del.icio.us, Digg, news 2.0, news business, research report, social news
Newspapers, go Digg yourself
A Cover story in the Economist was titled, "Who Killed the Newspapers?"
No one did. The papers killed themselves.
Like Ostriches with their heads stuck in stuck in sand, they see nothing but darkness brought out by Google News, in other words the newspapers CEOs are too lazy to put on their thinking hats.It wouldn't be a bad idea to
outsource the newspapers' CEO's jobs to India, China, Philipines, Eastern Europre and what have you.
The
recent deal done by 4 wire services with Google News is a stab in the back for the papers. The wire services get some money from Google for displaying news and are promised ad revenue from resulting traffic as well - the fee part is okay, but no one is making big Google ad money except some enterprising bloggers and blog networks.
Now, newspapers will be stuck with
'second hand' news wire stories and with huge salaries budgets to boot.
The only out is to be creative about generating advertising from online services:
For starters, they can
form an AP-like cooperative again and create something like
'Digg for the best News Writing for the day' - having the best of both worlds, Digg-like user freedom (free to vote, free to comment) free to submit their own content and Newspaper like
editorial curation - this can be a contender in the face of Google news. the stories are better and the aggregation (& story piling) is meaningful.
Despite its weaknesses, Digg is popular because it sends traffic to submitters, provided the stories are good (some Gaming doesn't harm at all)
It is another matter that the traffic seldom results in ad revenue and so the papers will have to find creative ways to generate advertising - the Guardian model of
'Dailycandy Style Special Offer from the paper' are a way to start.
If you need more validation: Recently, British Papers were reported to have increased their American readership.
The reason?: A big part of the traffic was sent by DrudgeReport.com, which is one of the pioneering aggregators.
News Indexing is hot and newspapers ought to get in it.
Digg, Drudge Report, Guardian - there is a solution in there somewhere.
Related MediaVidea StoriesBloggers' Page as the new Op-Ed pageDigg Bashing: A RoundupWhat if Top Digg Users were all JournalistsLabels: Digg, news 2.0, news aggregators, social news
Web 2.0 tools can only take you so far
Traditional news sites have taken to using Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, forums, user photos & videos and others in a big way, hoping that this will attract some of the user base that was graduating to Digg, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Techcrunch…among other Web 2.0 heavyweights.
Michael Arrington writes in
Techcrunch that USA Today, which took to a web 2.0 lifestyle in a big way, undergoing a design overhaul to boot, is not getting the returns it expected voting and commenting to bring in.
One reason may be that people are not getting that unique
‘Community Feel’.
Digg for example, despite all its obvious faults, has a community rooting for it, a community that submits stories, votes on them, comments on them – there is a sense of belonging.
On News sites such as USA Today, and a lot many other news sites that have bought off-the-shelf Web 2.0 tools, integrating them with their existing story flow, the feeling of community is perhaps not there.
The popular and successful method to build a community is to focus on a niche.
What is USA Today’s niche?
Piling on web 2.0 tools can only take you so far. If news sites do not want to be seen as lame copycats, they might start with building community silos around their popular columnists, columns.
They might also consider starting new communities around evocative themes plucked from the Zeitgeist – say, a user-generated section on
how to survive the housing bubble.
Giving a sense ownership of content to the reader builds new media brands.
There is no fun in USA Today journalists selecting and writing everything and asking everyone else to comment and vote.
As a commenter on Techcrunch puts it,
My comments on USA Today are meaningless. They add nothing, are seen by very few people, and don’t produce any movement in the earth’s gravitational shift. People want to participate because it makes a difference. If that is not the case, well then who really cares. It’s a novelty that soon wears off.
I think it was Doc Holliday who said,
"My hypocrisy will only take me so far."Labels: Digg, news 2.0, social news
Where is the next Big Internet Thing?
After blogging, user-generated content, Citizen Journalism, Youtube, Del.icio.us, Digg, I am tempted to believe, nothing new, exciting and useful has come on to the scene. This is a
phase of consolidation and rejiggling of business models.
There are far too me-too offerings.
Twitter and its ‘seemingly hipper’ competitor Pownce are time wasting lite variations of what Gmail can easily offer.
Facebook has been around for a lot of internet years now. The A-listers got to it after everyone else. The Facebook Platform is a faux –AOL application drive. T is nothing in Facebook that you can’t do on the open internet mashing Gmail, Google Reader, Blogger, Fliclkr and other freely available tools.
The
smartest Web 2.0 user of recent times is Republican Presidential hopeful Ron Paul, whose Web site is in reality a mashup of social networking, bookmarking, Youtube, Social news (Digg and Reddit) and other free tools. He is so smart he doesn’t have comments on his site and drives people to gather and hawk him on Digg.
Blog Networks were supposed to be the Newspaper conglomerates of tomorrow but barring some exceptions, some are content to
glorified content rewriters and others (e.g. Glam) are using conniving (or stupid) investment bankers to
raise more Venture Capital using dubious traffic calculation methodologies.
The really smarter blog networks are very few and focus on solid, old fashioned reporting and writing – Gawker, Gigaom, Paidcontent.
While Backfence failed to bring Citizen Journalism to every town USA, others like
Frontporch Forum,
iBrattleboro, Topix.com, New Assignment and Assignement Zero (which is now over) took CitiJ to new levels.
The Knight 21st Century News Challenge promises to support better news innovations and we will be better for them.
Copying the Digg model was, and still is, a noble cause and I am sorry to learn that the creators of Pligg, a Digg clone software, has put up its domain, Sourceforge account and community
up for sale - the
minimum bid being only $25,000.
Challenging Wikipedia and Google is always hip. Squidoo, Hubpages, Mahalo, Swickis, Techmeme and its controlled news index have to prove they can run with the giants for a long, long time and ultimately prove themselves.
Here’s to the reworking of existing models and to the next big internet thing.
Labels: innovation, social news, trends, web 2.0
Is Digg past its peak?
Erling L. Andersen researches
Digg’s traffic on Alexa and concludes what I have been suspecting for a while – Digg’s traffic is down.
Erling writes that Digg has lost almost half of its traffic from its ‘glory-days’ towards the end of 2006.
Reason? Erling thinks it is because of competition from Reddit, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and others.
For some time now, I suspected Digg was in a slump - the numbers of submissions in two popular Digg categories – Technology and Business are a bit down. While number of submissions on a whole remain the same, skirting the 8000 stories a day mark, The average Digg submitter writes more about technology and business than other, and maybe the arbitrary Buries are discouraging many users to participate anymore, or at least far less than they used to do before.
Then there is a bigger problem: Digg has always suffered from lack of good stories. More than ever, Kevin Rose and his gang must shift attention from their new baby Pownce, and try to bring focus back to Digg, which need good stories like never before.
As things stand, one suspects the original group of enthusiastic YTMs (young, techie males) that made Digg are moving on in life. In comparison, editor-moderated Slashdot powers on, with good stories coming in on a daily basis.
The Plateau before the decline is not a nice place to
dig in, pardon the pun.
Labels: Digg, social news
How the biggest value of Digg is enjoyed by Digg itself
We still don’t know what part of Digg’s massive traffic shows actual users browsing through Digg’s 6000-7000 a day submissions, making those submissions and how much outbound traffic Digg actually provides. We already know that
only a select group of sites make to Digg's homepage on a regular basis.
Till now we only have Compete’s outlandish claims that Digg has the same amount of traffic as Facebook. I don’t know what crazy piece of tech Compete is powered by (many believe it not different from Alexa, another dodgy counter) but we won’t know the truth until Digg makes its Statcounter (or any variant) public.
One theory behind the huge reported traffic numbers is the rapid growth of
“Add to Digg” widgets and
“Integrate this on your site” tools which
force users to go to the Digg Submission page.
Basically this means that readers on any site are forced to leave the site and go to Digg.
I doubt it we will ever know Digg’s incoming-outgoing traffic ratio and in all probability, we won’t be able to
the true benefit of social news sites.
Labels: Digg, social news
What is the purpose of Digg? Let's count the ways
On any given day, an estimated 15 million blog posts are being made, out of which 6000 or so are submitted to Digg, not more than 20 posts get any respectable attention – the rest are just spam, at least that’s how the big users see them as – lame, incorrect, these are some of the most common epithets being ascribed to buried stories.
Now, what is the point of existence of sites like Digg?
1. Is it outstanding journalism?If that is the case then I think the likes of New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, Christain Science Monitor and others are better served by a new digg-like system, which only aggregates stories from the top 100 news outlets in the world.
Digg as the modern version of the supermarket tabloid with a geeky edge is not far off the mark.
The Top Digged stories of today are:Find out what (American) accent you have. (very short quiz)911 refuses ambulance for woman dying in ER waiting room; nurses dont helpChina Threatens War Over Bush HandshakeGizmodo: Digg Spam SucksTeach the controversy: Pi = 3.0 (textbook stickers included!)11 Worst 007 GadgetsJudge suing dry cleaner cries over pants in courtIran moves to execute porn starsBBC: World Now in America // picsHilton's parents skip line on jail visit -unfair 2. Or, is it allowing a few blogs to come out and becoming mainstream news outlets themselves?
This seems more the case. The charm of Digg as a source of traffic is not what it was before. Randfish at Seomoz complained that the site was not getting as much digg traffic as before.
Harry Maugans did a study and found that only 15 or so sites have dominated Digg while it has been existence – so Digg as a champion of open source, web 2.0 style, anything style articles is surely out of question.
I was not surprised to know that big blogs such as Lifehacker have their own policy of putting dig buttons only on exclusive and original stories – these blogs are not blogs, but aspiring big-ticket magazines and Digg is their path to glory.
For example, have a look at
Lifehacker’s official Digg Policy.
3. Is it letting users discover better news?
For that you must compare all the big sites – Slashdot, Nytimes, BBC, Metafilter, Newsvine, Reddit and others and find out for yourself what you have been missing. Other than the Paris Hilton story in 2005, I haven’t come across a ‘unique – only-on Digg’ story. The Virginia Tech story got faster home page traction on Newsvine than Digg, where it got stuck in the middle pages.
For tech stories of depth, Slashdot is any day better. But if if you are in for boobs and gadgets maybe Digg is fit for you..
If you are patient enough, you might find gems while browsing tag on the quiet but effective Del.icio.us.
4. Is it making Users happy?If there is one category of users that Digg makes happy is that group of 14-24 year olds who make snap judgments on the merits of a story about Obama’s Kennedy like appeal (By the way Diggers are heavy on someone called Ron Paul), decisions that make or break many an online entrepreneur’s short-term fate.
These guys may be good coders but does that mean all coders are all-around Mensa geniuses? I don’t know. But i bet the judges during the inquisition period in Europe took a little more time.
Some of the Digg users are happy making pithy comments but if it is valuable comments you are looking for, Slashdot, Techcrunch are more worthy places to be at.
At the end of it all, Digg is mostly about a select group of people, putting a select group of blogs and news outlets on top while the most blog posts are discarded to oblivion. People have long debated the merits of social news, about the possibilities of better Digg-like systems; however, little has been done on this front so far.
The situation of all those eager bloggers and all those posts going nowhere doesn’t make you happy.
The whole world is not crap or ‘lame’ as a digger might put it. There may not be 15 million original blog posts a day but there may be thousands and in the way it deals with most submitted stories,
Digg is no better than a web 2.0 baiter such as Andrew Keen who believes that it is all
amateurish trash.Labels: Digg, lifehacker, social news, web 2.0
A quick content analysis of top social news sites
I looked at recent headlines from 6 social news sites: Digg, Newsvine, Slashdot, Boing Boing (group blog), Fark, Metafilter and 1 news site, The New York Times.
I found a couple of things which I would like to share with you:
- Each site has its own quirks and coverage style - No news site is the ultimate news site.In the latest column in
BivingsReport, the writer analyzes what is wrong with Newsvine and offers 3 things that are wrong with the social news site:
1. Too much AP content, most of which is international commodity news easily found elsewhere on the Net.
2. Providing a mix of editorial news content (NYT) and social news content by community does not help user – the study says it could neither get comprehensive editorial matter or exciting social news matter.
3. Too many navigation choices on front page which may confuse users: Most Active Stories, Top Seeds, Newsvine Live, Newsvine Columnists, Top Wire, Newsvis, Group Spotlight, etc.
On the other hand, Digg has just 2 broad sections: Popular and Upcoming
4. AP’s content may be coming in way of more social content coming to the front page.The bottomline: Newsvine must focus on one single thing – exactly what they are. Maybe, you can’t be everything to everyone.
The 7 news sites with recent top 10 stories and my notes for each:DiggWordpress 2.2 officially released!
Borat and Martha Stewart on The Tonight Show
The Lighthouse Skyscraper: 4000 Solar Panels, 3 Huge Wind Turbines [Photos]
Sun's CEO response to Microsoft patent claims
Old IPv4 flaws resurface with IPv6
High Times Editorial Office- NEW CollegeHumor Original
RIAA's IP Gathering Techniques About to be Busted
Windows Vista sells 40M licenses in 100 days
I stole the digg LED sign
Shocking Mainstream Media Defense of Ron Paul's 9/11 debate comments
Note: It is obvious that the Digg Community likes middle-of-the-road, ‘not too deep’ stories on gadgets and science, and quirky online obsessions such as the current penchant for Ron Paul stories. Yesterday, one of the top stories was a list of top wardrobe malfunctions.
NewsvineCar Bomb Kills at Least 32 in Iraq
Sarkozy Inaugurated As France President
4 Peacekeepers Killed in Somalia
Afghans Protest at Pakistan Embassy
Road Accident Kills 20 in India
Daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. Dies
Nigerian Politician's Home Blown Up
Report: Bono Objects to Penthouse Smoke
Sony Corp's Quarterly Loss Widens
LA Wants to Slash Greenhouse Gases
Note: Mostly international stories, nothing stands out in particular.
However, there are occasional flashes of brilliance.
Did you know Newsvine put the Virginia tech shooting story ob front page faster than Digg did?
Metafilter"I am not the attorney general. That's the attorney general."
Semiwar
I'm a great believer in unintended consequences
Wey oh wey oh wey oh wey oh.
Down the memory hole
Awesome Tapes from Africa
V-TECH RAMPAGE
UniverseNewsFilter: Scientists claim to have detected dark matter
Wedding Ring Coffin
Histoire(s) DVD
Note: Metafilter news feels like a cozy magazine for a group of insiders with an all-around coverage style.
The quality of these eclectic stories is good, often making you feel you are reading New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly.
SlashdotClick Here To Infect Your PC!
Wolfram Offers Prize For (2,3) Turing Machine
A Side Effect of Testosterone Poisoning
Threat To Free, Legal Guitar Tablature Online
Independent Human Interface Guidelines
MIT Hacks XKCD Talk With AACS key
US Senators Question Indian Firms Over H-1Bs
The Rise of "Hybrid" Vinyl-MP3s
Toyota Going 100% Hybrid By 2020
Linus Responds To Microsoft Patent Claims
Note: Slashdot’s focus is technology and the stories reflect this. The stories have ore depth than Digg. Reason is obvious: Editors working in the background.
Boing BoingJerry Fallwell talks about his first time.
George Bush's cone of cell phone silence
EL Doctorow's gigantic Civil War novel "The March"
Neuros OSD: a set-top box that treats you like an owner
Your old CD ROMs could help kill a bogus patent!
Insane children's book depicts horse smoking drugs, drinking
Art pieces left on store shelves
Salvador Dali on "What's My Line?"
Physicians for Social Responsibility Gala, June 7
Rocketboom covers Maker Faire
Note: BoingBoing’s forte is
geeky eclectism and it shows up in the story selection on this group blog. The focus is on what geeks like to read, mixed in with the occasional online rights and wrongs type of stories.
FarkIf you are going to make a false claim to police that you were robbed of $3500 you just withdrew from th...
A Hitchhiker's Guide to Instant Karma...
The 160 books boys must read - No Dickens, no Rowling, but yes to Pratchett and Pullman...
Veteran sherpa Appa ; scales Mt Everest for 17th time...
"If you want to play the works of Mozart or Beethoven, you also have to think and feel like the inf...
Old and busted: Drive-In movies. New hotness: Drive-In church...
Proving once again that Italian culture is about 50 years behind, Sophia Loren to strip if Naples moves ...
Photoshop this television technician...
Ugly ass red wolf pups on display at Florida zoo. Complete with ugly ass slideshow in link...
How to surf on calm water using nothing more than a surfboard and a few sticks of dynamite...
Note: Fark is the
zanier, highly opinionated version of Digg.
Its USP: great headlines. It tends to slide towards a pulp read. The new generation supermarket tabloid, perhaps?
NytimesPresident Intervened in Dispute Over Eavesdropping
Poppy Fields Are Now a Front Line in Afghanistan War
Bush Nominee to Get Payment From Old Job
Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority Founder, Dies at 73
Now Departing: Airline Careers
Ivy League Admissions Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier
Bush Picks General to Coordinate War Policy
Among the Rich, a New Dispute Over Air Rights
Terror Attack Scenario Exposes Deep Differences Among G.O.P. Hopefuls
News Analysis: Reality Overtakes the Illusion of Unity in Gaza
The rules
Note: You can feel the heavy duty editorial quality working full-time – news analysis, live reporting, big picture writing.
The Times’ political coverage is evident in today’s headlines but its technological and business coverage is as good and the stories find mention on Digg and Reddit on a daily basis.
This is also where from many bloggers pick stories to write upon.
Labels: Digg, news 2.0, social news
7 simple steps to a successful Social News Site like Digg
Creating social news is not for the
faint hearted. Digg, and to some extent Reddit were a one-off phenomenon.
The tools for making a social news site are as easily available (Pligg, Phpdugg, etc) as tools for creating a blog or opening a Myspace type site. However, social news is about a community and creating a community is time and money consuming task which takes dedication to your topic.
I have tried to point out some steps that IMHO will help you create a ‘viable’ Social News site.
1. Find a unique topicDigg does what successful blogs have been doing for quite a while – it focuses on the magic quartet of gossip, gaming, gadgets (the 3Gs) and entertainment.
Politics is also covered well on Digg.
You might want to do a research of all Digg clones and look for any missing niche there.
This
list of Digg Clones is a great place to start researching.
2. Build a site with personality (voice)Do it all by yourself. Create multiple user IDs, submit interesting stories, rate them, and comment on them yourself.
This is what the founders of Reddit did for a few months, until a constant flow of quality stories got a bigger user base.
3. Find like minded peopleIf you can find a way to address people who love your chosen niche, you are in.
Kevin Rose had a TV platform from where he evangelized Digg to like-minded Techies, who have stuck with him since and have only increased in number.
For example, if you are a journalist writing political stories, you may network with other like-minded political journalists convincing them to spend at least 30 min submitting stories and commenting on your site.
Moreover, you must give these like-minded people a valid reason to shift their allegiance to you from their existing favorite online haunts. Digg gave the promise of doing away with Slashdot-like editor-controlled filters.
What promise do you have? 4. Give them a reason to keep coming backQuality stories, day after day – that is the only mantra.
5. No ads at startI read once that a blog shouldn’t have ads until it has traffic of at least 1000 people a day. Something similar applies to Digg clones, most of which are chock full of adsense and other ads.
This is sure recipe to piss off users.
6. Spend money to get usersSet aside some money to spend on promoting your site - Adwords campaign, contests, text ad links, freebies, etc.
You will have to literally snatch people away from other social news sites.
If you are well-funded, do what Jason Calacanis did. He announced to pay $1000 per month to top Diggers who moved to the revamped Netscape site.
Forums are a good place to look for users for your social news site.
7. Be the biggest news submitter to your siteStock up your RSS reader. Check them every hour for any scoop.
Digg got a big boost from the Paris Hilton stories, just when she was becoming infamous.
The key to making a successful Social news site is the community, the same essential ingredient that goes into making successful blogs.
One more thing: building a successful Social News site will take more of your time than building a successful blog. Remember, people will link to a good blog post, they won’t link to a good Social News link, and after all it is an aggregator.
Labels: Digg, social news
Social Networks: For the community, by the community, of the community
That is the important message members of Digg have sent, setting forth a template of an action plan for all those who think they are running a social network site/business.
They are not running anything. The community is running itself.
The community wants to be heard. That is the main idea of communities everywhere. We are making too much of sharing. No one in the village shares except news about the latest weather.
The
Digg revolt has a serious (& timely) lesson for all those who run social networks:
be fair. Be transparent.As this
article points out, if Digg administrators had shared the information (cease and desist letter, in this case) and the dilemma, and discussed what step to take next, the
madness of the crowd would not have taken place.
Discussing things. Bringing issues out in the open.It is how popular leaders in successful democracies and organizations do things.
We must keep in mind that new-fangled nations like that of Digg have no boundaries or Visa requirements.
Paraphrasing Doc Holliday,
“your hypocrisy only takes you so far.”It is ironical that despite all that talk of
two-way conversations, the bosses at Digg forgot to use the tools they keep championing all the time.
All it would have taken was a single story submission by Kevin Rose, with the headline:
“Digg users, we have a problem.”Labels: Digg, social networking, social news
