Despite whatever Digg’s administrators tells us, Digg.com has a bias towards certain websites over others.  Why do I say this?  I have a Digg account where I submitted 477 stories and have gotten about 63 websites homepaged so that automatically gives me experience in knowing how the site works.  Below are several cases why I’m telling you that Digg is biased towards certain websites over others.

Case 1 (A lot of Diggs doesn’t meant you’ll get homepaged if the site isn’t “white listed” by Digg): In one case, one of the stories I submitted received over 280 Diggs and over 15 comments, but still wasn’t homepaged.  About 219 days ago, a story called “The Constitution Dies Tomorrow” received over 1,000 Diggs and over 100 comments, but still wasn’t homepaged.  It didn’t get homepaged until TechCrunch pointed it out and Digg probably didn’t want the negative PR from Arrington so they decided to add it to the homepage.

One time I submitted an article from NBA.com and it was homepaged with about 70-75 diggs and one comment.  Even though I submitted that article, I actually thought it made the Digg.com homepage undeservedly based on those numbers.  Those numbers don’t seem very community-focused to me.  I’ve seen a lot better written articles with a lot more Diggs and comments not get homepaged at all.

Case 2 (Crawl3.digg.internal): There have been several cases where people have noticed a mysterious connection on their server called Crawl3.digg.internal appeared shortly before their stories disappeared from Digg.com’s homepage. Pronet Advertising has pointed out that the internal Digg team is notorious for burying stories that they aren’t too fond of. And HMTK.com pointed out that crawl3.digg.internal showed up on his server around 10AM on March 5 when the story disappeared from the homepage.

Case 3 (Pulse2.com experience): Pulse2.com got homepaged once for less than one minute.  One of the articles I put together about 228 days ago explored the benefits of shouting stories and adding friends on Digg.  It was made popular, but never made it to the homepage.  I’ve never heard of a case where this has happened to someone before.  The story was called “How To Effectively Utilize Digg Shouts 101.”  I have reason to believe that crawl3.digg.internal buried it and blacklisted pulse2.com because this site has never been seen on the Digg frontpage since then.  This makes me believe that if you get touched with the crawl3.digg.internal once, you get blacklisted from making the Digg homepage ever again.

I tried writing all sorts of content that would be interesting and not teach people how to use Digg anymore, but it didn’t matter if I had over 250 diggs on a story and 10 comments, it would never be homepaged.  Even this story I wrote yesterday was submitted by Atomicpoet, got 184 diggs, and 15 comments but didn’t get homepaged at all.  If the same story was written by The New York Times, ReadWriteWeb, or Ars Technica, the odds of it getting homepaged would have been much higher.

And last, but not least:

Case 4 (8 Websites Control Over 30% of the Digg.com Technology page):  When you look at the navigation order at the top of Digg, you’ll notice that the Technology section comes first.  This is why I decided to analyze which websites in the Technology section make the homepage the most based on Digg’s bias towards them.  It turns out that the results were pretty staggering.  There are 8 websites that control over 30% of the Technology section homepage.

How did I figure this out?  I obviously had to pick a sample size first.  I decided about 8 days of data is a good enough sample size to base my statement.  So I went back about 8 days worth of pages and counted how many times a certain story from a specific website was homepaged.  I counted about 270 from the technology section were homepaged in the last 8 days.  94 (or 34.18%) of those stories were from the same 8 websites.  For example Ars Technica was homepaged about 17 times, AppleInsider about 16 times, and TorrentFreak about 16 times in the last 8 days for the Technology section.  Those three websites alone make up 18% of the Technology stories that were homepaged in the last 8 days.

Coincidentally around the same time I wrote this article, the Digg blog was writing an article about an update to the algorithm.  Apparently they thought it was hilarious to say that MC Hammer controls what stories get homepaged and which ones get buried.  Its too bad that me and Digg don’t share the same sense of humor. I think I speak for a lot of users when I demand more transparency from Digg.  How many times is a story getting buried?  When a story gets buried, how much does it set a story back?  Which stories are getting buried by the community and which ones are getting buried by internal staff?

4 billion plus Diggs, but only one person decided to comment.  Best of all it was only submitted 30 min ago.

Facebook has introduced a new feature that reminds me of Digg and FriendFeed.  Everytime someone submits some sort of content like an article, photos, videos, links, reviews, etc., there will be a thumbs up or thumbs down button available.  Every time someone clicks on thumbs up, it will report who else liked the same content.

“Recently, I had a friend write a note about running her first marathon and another friend upload pictures of his new baby. In both cases, they ended up with over 30 comments, all saying: ‘Awesome!’ ‘Congrats!’ The aggregation of the sentiment ‘I like this’ makes room in the comments section for longer accolades,” stated Facebook employee Leah Pearlman.

Digg and FriendFeed use similar icons.  Digg uses these icons to vote comments up or down and FriendFeed uses these icons to indicate whether stories being shared are liked.

Digg cut about 10% of their workforce last week and announced that they wanted to expand upon their sales team in order to lean towards profitability.  This is why Digg has hired Tom Shin as their new head of sales.  Shin comes from Yahoo! where he was one of the top salesman in the Northwest region.  Shin’s job will be to manage the relationship with Microsoft and find leads for direct advertising.

While Shin was at Yahoo! he helped Yahoo! Mail grow from $20 million in revenue to $300 during the 7 years that he was Director of Product Marketing for the division.

I believe that with Shin on board, Digg will be able to achieve profitability based on Shin’s track record.  Given Digg has 35 million users and many are tech-savvy, this gives Shin a lot to work with in terms of pitching advertising campaigns to Fortune 500 companies.  Now hopefully we’ll stop seeing ads like these:

Although Digg has about 35 million users registered, they are bleeding money.  Although the numbers reported from BusinessWeek earlier were false according to Digg’s CEO*, the company still has yet to achieve profitability.  Therefore they are laying off about 10% of their workforce, or about 7 people.  However, Digg CEO Jay Adelson reported that the company will be hiring a direct sales force and head of sales to help drive profitability.

This is the first time that Digg will be building advertising support structure.  Digg’s deal with Microsoft will remain, but the company also plans to create a new advertising support structure.  For example, Digg Dialog is a way for the community to interact with government officials and the company would be open for sponsorship of such events.

“It is true we have been focused on growth and user features. We had this Microsoft deal to take us to profitability, and we were definitely focused on the user experience. We didn’t focus on the ramp time to break-even. We never felt there would be any challenge to monetize Digg,” stated Adelson.

*BusinessWeeek reported that last year, Digg lost $2.8 million on $4.8 million in revenue and lost $4 million on $6.4 million in revenue during the first three quarters of 2008.

Stay classy Digg.

Last night I returned home from an eight day vacation.  Catching up on work for me includes clearing through all of the shouts that I received on Digg.com that I received over the last 8 days.  I had about 250 pages worth of unread Digg shouts sitting around.

Why is this a big deal?  Digg lists 10 unread shouts per page and you cannot select more than one to delete at a time.  That means I have to click the delete button about 2,500 times and click on the next page about 250 times.  That could consume a lot of bandwidth which translates into additional operating costs for the social bookmarking site.

If Digg introduced a button to allow users to quickly delete a page worth or even 250 pages worth of shouts in one swoop, it would save Digg money and save time for their users.  At one point there was a solution to this dilemma in the form of a Greasemonkey Digg script hack.  But Digg recently went on a banning spree for those who used these scripts to prevent people from what they believed was “gaming the system.”

From my perspective I believe that Digg shouts are the equivalent of e-mailing news stories to family and friends or sending messages on Facebook, but doing it in a more copious manner.   Every e-mail provider allows you to delete a mass number of messages at once.  Facebook allows users to delete a page full of messages in one swoop.  Why should Digg be any different?

Deleting Facebook messages, e-mails, and Digg shouts is a way of clearing out old, cluttered information.  Digg makes it a bit harder.  Regardless, I’ll be spending a good amount of my Saturday deleting about 2,500 Digg shouts.

Digg is still figuring out how to monetize it’s traffic. Display ads are’nt cutting it. In 2007, the ads brought in $4.8 million and the company lost $2.8 million. 2008 was not much better. In the first three quarters of 08, Digg brought in $6.4 million and lost $4 million.

When you are one of the most talked about websites on the Internet, and you have revenue numbers that bad, there is definitely a problem. Digg has raised a total of $40 million in funding. It’s last funding round valued the company at $164 million. The company has tried to sell itself many times. Their last “almost acquisition” by Google went south.

Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson says he plans to make the company profitabe in a year. Digg is exploring a user-driven advertising platform. They may also be cooking up other things to increase revenue.

Nevertheless, Digg’s traffic will continue to grow. The company has enough cash on had to ride the recession. And someone will eventually buy it.

[Dr. Qi Lu]                               [Andrei Zmievski via Flickr]

Dr. Qi Lu has been hired by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) to run their Online Services Group.  Dr. Lu will be working especially in Microsoft’s search and online advertising unit.  He will be reporting to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Prior to Microsoft, Lu was the EVP of Engineering of Search and Advertising Technology Group at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO).  He worked on Yahoo!’s search and monetization platforms.  Lu was with Yahoo! for about 10 years.

“I am tremendously excited to welcome Qi to Microsoft,” stated Ballmer. “Dr. Lu’s deep technical expertise, leadership capabilities and hard-working mentality are well-known in the technology industry, and Microsoft will benefit from his addition to our executive management team.”

——–

Andrei Zmievski, Chief Architect at Outspark, PHP Core Developer at PHP Group, and former Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo!/Overture has joined Digg.  He will be working at Digg as an Open Source Fellow starting tomorrow.

As you recently may remember, major Digg competitor Reddit went completely open source a couple of months ago.  Perhaps Digg’s hiring of Andrei indicates that Digg also plans to make major contributions to the open source community.

Congratulations to Dr. Lu and Andrei!

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal published an article about how Democrats are winning in the polls and online.  As a matter of fact, the traffic of liberal political blog, HuffingtonPost.com (HuffPo) has skyrocketed.  Their traffic numbers have quadrupled since last year.  As of September 2008, HuffPo received 4.5 million uniques per month.  Drudgereport.com, the conservative blog had 2 million uniques.

Below is an image I pulled from The WSJ, collected from comScore:

As of September of last year, drudgereport.com had about 1.2 million and HuffPo had 792,000 uniques.  Talkingpointsmemo.com had gone from 32,000 uniques to 458,000 uniques over the last year.  Talking Points Memo started around 2000 during the Florida vote recount process.  Conservative blog, RedState.com jumped from 38,000 uniques last year to 235,000 uniques this year.

Another trend that is easy to notice is that HuffPo seems to be dominating the Digg homepage these days. In the last 2 days, HuffPo had over 11 articles hit the Digg homepage.  Check out the screenshot below of the last 8 stories:

I did a similar search query for the DrudgeReport.com and the last time they had reached the Digg homepage was 94 days ago.  That right there tells you something about why they are dropping in traffic.

This also tells you something about Digg too.  Digg users tend to prefer reading a liberal bias view during the course of this election.  There is a direct correlation between Huffington Post traffic soaring and the sudden popularity of Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin.  This will become even more apparent after the conclusion of the voting process on November 4.

Social bookmarking company, Digg.com announced today that they have raised $28.7 million.  The funding was led by Highland Capital Partners.  They plan to use this round of funding to invest in their infrastructure, accelerate new features, and expand internationally.  Of Digg’s 30 million monthly unique visitors, nearly half of them are from out of the country.  Digg wants to make it so that their website supports many languages. 

Digg will enhance the Recommendation engine and create additional deeper categories.  International growth will commence at the beginning of 2009.  The company will be moving to bigger offices in San Francisco, Calif. and increase the number of jobs.

This round of funding is announced 3 months after a rumor that Google was considering an acquisition of Digg.  Digg has been working with Allen and Company for seeking a new round of funding.  Digg now has about a total of $40 million in funding.  Revision3, the other company that is led by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson has $9 million in funding. 

If Digg is serious about being acquired, then they may have to ask for a higher price than the rumored $200-$300 million that they were rumored to be looking for.  Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg confirmed the round of funding on the Digg Blog.

[image credit: Owen Byrne]

Facebook Connect is getting closer to fully rolling out with all of their partners which includes CBS, ABC, Hulu, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, Xobni, etc.  Pretty soon anyone with a Facebook account will be able to log into Digg using Facebook Connect.  Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg stated that this is “the next step of collaborative filtering.”

All 100 million of Facebook users will be able to log in to Digg using their regular Facebook username and password.  With an increase is the number of Digg users, the social bookmarking platform wants to be able to cater to your interests.

It is the next step of collaborative filtering. It is the idea that instead of looking at a social network that you’ve created yourself, that you’ve entered in the names, I am going to look at all of you, everyone, and I’m going to compare you all together. I am going to find people like you and I am going to use that collective wisdom to find things that are more specifically interesting to you [TechCrunch].

Buzz words aside, I believe collaborative filtering is a way of saying that when you log into Digg through Facebook Connect, you’ll be able to find out what your Facebook friends are Digging.  So let’s say that I’m Facebook friends with Joe Schmoe and he Diggs an article about the “Top 10 Best Ways to Collaboratively Filter Something.”  Since Joe Schmoe and I are both logged into Digg through Facebook Connect, I will probably find out that he either Dugg or submitted that article.  That is how I envision collaborative filtering.

There will be a live discussion on The Drill Down at 9:30PM Mountain Standard Time on Friday night regarding the massive Digg user ban.  The Drill Down is a video podcast led by the top 3 Digg users: Andrew Sorcini (Mr. Baby Man), Muhammad Saleem, and Reg ‘Zaibatsu.’  It’ll be an interesting discussion.  I won’t be there to live blog it, but I highly encourage others to participate.

Below is an e-mail that DiggBoss (the creator of a script that is causing Digg users to be banned) sent to Digg officials and is awaiting reply.  What makes his case interesting is that all of the scripts he built for GreaseMonkey are based on Digg APIs.  Stay tuned for what happens.

Subject : Banned from Digg for developing an app using Digg APIs

Hello Digg Support -

1) My script did not digg automatically or add digg buttons.
2) My script checked if a users friend had dugg his last 15 submission
and displayed them on the Digg Friends or Fans Page (see here -
http://docs.google.com/File?id=dfwd5kvr_7gc3pxsdk_b)
3) My script had a feature “Friends Not Dugg” which could be used in
the shout box. Please review the image -
http://docs.google.com/File?id=dfwd5kvr_5cgkcwscs_b – here again I
checked from Diggs API who had dugg a particular story and only
selected the friends that had not dugg the story in the shout box.
4) My script optionally pre-filled the individual shout box with the
friends name and his signature
(http://docs.google.com/File?id=dfwd5kvr_10c6dr8bc7_b)

As you can see from the above, my script used APIs. My script was a
feature’s add-on to Digg site, you may call it a “widget” and not in
any way used to rig the Digg Algo.

And to my credit just 2 days back I also seek permission from you to
have my script reviewed on this thread -
http://groups.google.com/group/diggapi/browse_thread/thread/9f5fbb6567dbc7bc?hl=en
- which was declined, but before I could get necessary clearance I was
banned in 48 hours.

I am a coder, the mentioned scripts were not offered to be sold but to
be used by users as Widgets. The scripts used APIs – I was probably
banned cause the Digg Support thought “ohh these are scripts – lets get
this man.”

I have deleted the scripts from the server, please check here – http://checkfriends.appspot.com/

Digg.com is probably one of the most powerful sites that can make your blog a powerhouse.  I’ve seen Digg take some of the blogs that I compete directly with to an astonishing Alexa rank, a high number of RSS subscribers, and unbelievable amounts of traffic.  As people gain power on Digg, they let it influence them to do things they shouldn’t.  MrBabyMan, MSaleem, Zaibatsu, MakiMaki, SuperNova17, Digitalgopher, MKLopez, Cliffosakajapan, skored, and Albertpacino are the top 10 Digg users and have the power to dominate a lot of the homepage real estate on Digg.com.

Other Digg users weren’t happy with a group of people retaining all this power so they invented easy Digging scripts for people to use.  These scripts allowed Digg users to do things that Digg management didn’t want them to be able to do.  Such as checking to see which of your friends are Digging your stories.  Another script would even automatically Digg stories for you while you were sleeping.  One more Digg script placed a Digg It button in the Incoming shouts page, a place that Digg intended not to have a button placed.

Jen Burton, Community Manager at Digg wrote a blog post stating that using scripts results in a violation of the Digg Terms of Use and will result in a ban.  I’ve used Digg for about two years now and have achieved about a 6% popular rate.  About 18 of the 300 stories I’ve submitted to Digg was homepaged.  I’ve tried the scripts a couple of times, but when I found out that they violate TOS, I uninstalled them immediately.

From one active Digg user to other active Digg users, I urge you to uninstall any scripts you have that modifies the way that Digg operates otherwise you will be banned.  Over 80 accounts have been deleted overnight.  You can find the list of them at the GetSmartBlog.  One of the notable bans that were made for using scripts is Brian Cuban, the brother of Internet billionaire Mark Cuban.  Surprisingly, none of the top 10 was banned.  But when Mr. Baby Man was interviewed recently, he denied using scripts or even from knowing what scripts were on his live video podcast. 

One of the most interesting parts of Mr. Baby Man’s discussion about whether he uses scripts was when he was asked what he would have Kevin Rose change about the company.  He replied make it more open and transparent– allow users to see what is going on.  Owen Byrne, co-founder of Digg agreed with Mr. Baby Man and stated:

“Open up the site, open up transparency, let people see what’s going
on…” How true that is, and I can guarantee you that you won’t see it
until Jay and Kevin are gone. I should know, as they did a masterful
job of suppressing my role as co-founder.

[pictured left, photo credit: Facebook]

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Director of Communications, Kiersten Hollars has left the company to pursue a career at Digg.com.  Hollars will become the lead of Digg’s communication team.  Hollars previously reported to Brad Garlinghouse, author of the Peanut Butter manifesto document. 

Garlinghouse left Yahoo! this past june.  Hollars’ previous boss, Brad Horowitz left for Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in February.  Amit Kumar, Director of Product Management for Yahoo! Search Monkey is also resigning by the end of this week to join Dapper.

Employee retention is not looking good for Yahoo! right now.  This is something that Yahoo! should prioritize as they have lost over 100 executives since January 2007.  TechCrunch broke the news about Hollars departure.