Tag Archives: Digg
31 Interesting Social Media Data Visualization Tools
Every day millions of people are tweeting, digging, voting up on reddit, IMing, texting, and uploading video content. Keeping track of everything on the Internet can be overwhelming. Visualizing some of this data can make things easier on our eyes. There are lots of tools out there that can help visualize and make sense of all of the user generated data. The purpose of this blog post is to raise the awareness of the tools available as of today. I have broken down the tools by the associated websites in alphabetical order here.
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Categories Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Google Maps, Last.fm, Lists, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube
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Digg Homepage To Get Location Awareness Eventually
Kevin Rose was at the Web 2.0 Expo and admitted that he was interested in making the Digg homepage location based. That means that those who are in Chicago will see a different Digg homepage than those in London. But Rose said that the technology isn’t there to offer that option yet. “The noise out there is extreme” said Rose during an interview.
Rose had invested in FourSquare earlier this year which is a location-based mobile application company. That investment indicated his interest in making services more location-based. Rose also recently invested in DailyBooth which is a company that competes against TwitPic.
Categories Digg, Kevin Rose
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WeFollow Becomes Digg Property
WeFollow is a directory of Twitter users that where anyone can join and associate themselves with 3 tags. WeFollow was a personal project by Digg founder Kevin Rose, but it seems that the information used by the website was useful for Digg. There apparently wasn’t any money involved in the deal. WeFollow has about 654,000 Twitter users connected to tags.
Digg plans to revamp WeFollow by ranking users based on who tags themselves properly. WeFollow will rank users based on the most followers and most influential. Below is a screenshot of the new upcoming design, as uploaded by TechCrunch.
Categories Digg, WeFollow.com
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Digg Makes Community Less Relevant, Removes Icons From Submissions
I’m not going to lie, I like the submissions that make it to the homepage of Digg.com. I visit their homepage at least once per day. The news is often times entertaining and relevant in every day news. Many people have built a brand around the stories that they’ve submitted on Digg.
For example, the icon of power Digg user Mr. Baby Man (Andrew Sorcini) built a brand around his Digg icon that features a stick figuring digging with a construction sign. Muhammad Saleem, another power Digg user built a brand around his black spade icon. Many people even decorate their icons depending on what holiday is coming up. If Christmas time is near, people will stick a Santa hat on their icon.
Now when a story is submitted, the user’s icon will not show up anymore. There is still a hyperlink that links to the user’s profile that submitted the story, but I don’t think that is fair for people that have built a brand for their icon. In a way, it makes the Digg community seem less relevant.
Why did Digg do it? Apparently they did it to save costs. Digg engineer John Quinn stated “Today, we’re also making some changes to reduce page payloads and minimize HTTP requests with subtle UI changes. By removing the 16px user icon from stories on the home page and other story lists, we’re reducing HTTP requests to Digg for a warm cache load by around 75%.”
What are your thoughts on the changes? Perhaps you prefer to see the icons? Or do you just not care at all?
Categories Digg, John Quinn
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Digg Says DiggBar URL Changes Permanent
Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson said in a company blog post that the the way Digg handles shortened URLs is permanent. Originally, a Digg shortened URL would link directly to the source. Now it links to the source’s Digg story and comments page on Digg.com. However, If you are logged into Digg, the shortened URL will redirect you to the source and not Digg.com.
Adelson said that Digg never wanted to become a URL shortening service. URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tinyurl decrease the size of large URLs so it can be shared over Twitter and other social sites.
The changes apparently took place when Digg founder Kevin Rose was on vacation. At the time, he said he was unaware of the changes.
Digg users are very unhappy about the changes. The DiggBar created a lot of controversy when it was launched. People hated the DiggBar so Digg made it optional for logged in users and discontinued it for logged out users.
Digg did mention that all links created prior to today would redirect to their original story.
Categories Digg
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Sub.Digger+ Digg Script Makes Tracking Friends More Intuitive, But Puts Users At Risk
Sub.Digger+ is a new script made for social news website Digg.com. Sub.Digger+ makes using Digg.com a lot more intuitive especially if you and your friends are active on the website. The service showcases a friends’ story submissions in an iframe slideshow format. Digg allows you to view a friends’ submission too, but it is delivered in a way where you have to click through many pages to see them.
The problem with Sub.Digger+ is that it is a script. Digg’s terms of service explicitly states that users that have scripts may be banned. This is the reason why Brian Cuban was banned and why user MrBabyMan Andrew Sorcini was interrogated last year. Digg user DiggBoss sent an e-mail to Digg admins about why his scripts should be allowed and why users should not be banned. Digg employee Jen Burton did not give much of a response to the scripts except that the company was tweaking the algorithm to make Digg users feel like it was not necessary to use scripts.
To get started with Sub.Digger+, go to http://sub.diggerplus.com/ and type in your user name. After that the Digg toolbar will appear at the top and the Sub.Digger+ toolbar will appear at the bottom. All of your friends’ latest submissions will appear in ascending order by submission. There is even a list view feature that shows over 100 submitted friend stories at once.
[via ReadWriteWeb]
Categories Digg, Sub.Digger+
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New Digg APIs May Give Developers Chance To Make Some Money
Digg has announced a new set of APIs that give developers access to Digg content. The new API set gives developers access to search endpoints. The Digg APIs will allow developers to use advanced shortcuts, common search tricks, and search by domain name.
Another API gives developers the chance to find related information on other Digg stories and find similar stories that diggers have dugg. There is also an API that returns Digg stories with similar keywords. In the near future, Digg plans to add Digging and burying capabilities to the APIs.
Another major limitation that was removed from the API license is the commercial agreement. Developers will now be able to use Digg APIs and have full ownership of the fees for free.
[via Digg Blog]
Categories Digg
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Advertisements To Appear In The Digg Stream
Earlier this week, social bookmarking and voting website Digg.com introduced a new way that they plan on monetizing their website. There will be sponsored advertisements appearing on the homepage and in the Digg stream starting in a few months.
“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,” wrote Mike Maser, Digg’s Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer. “Digg Ads will appear alongside stories in the river. The sponsored content will look and feel similar to regular Digg content, but will be clearly marked as sponsored. It may link to stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many of the same types of content you see on Digg every day. The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it’s relevant to the Digg audience, or not.”
The advertisements will be labeled as sponsored and there will be links to trailers, websites, and product reviews.
As much as an interesting idea this is, I strongly believe that it could have its consequences. The Digg community is extremely sensitive about the type of content that appears on the homepage. The community seems to have a bit of a liberal bias and prefer to use Apple products over Microsoft. Let’s say that Microsoft puts an ad into the stream, it is more than likely that more users will bury the ad. This takes more money away from Microsoft’s pockets.
From what it sounds like, Digg will be doing some rigorous testing to make sure that there aren’t too many flaws with the system.
The above picture is a screenshot of what an ad in the stream may look like. You will notice that there is a Sims 3 ad in the top right and an article in the stream.
Chas Edwards Steps Down From Federated Media To Join Digg
Chas Edwards was the Chief Revenue Officer at Federated Media up until now. He has quit to become the Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer at social bookmarking website Digg.com. Digg hired Thomas Shin from Yahoo! recently and he will be reporting directly to Edwards.
Mike Maser, the current Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer at Digg will become the Chief Strategy Officer. He will control the marketing, community management, and business development at Digg.
Federated Media founder John Battelle plans to start looking for Edwards’ replacement. This past January, Federated Media cut their staff and decided to start focusing on conversational marketing. Federated Media and Microsoft also recently started a project together called ExecTweets which I thought was a terrible idea.
Two of Federated Media’s biggest publisher partners GigaOM and TechCrunch recently cancelled their agreements. GigaOM decided to sign with a different ad partner and TechCrunch decided to sell ads directly themselves. Digg themselves left in 2007 after a partnership with Microsoft.
Edwards joins Digg at a time where the company has decided to find additional revenue streams. Digg is also focusing on directly sales and is pushing for profitability. Digg made about $8.5 million in revenue in 2008 and they will probably need to make double that amount in order to become profitable.
[via TechCrunch]
Categories Chas Edwards, Digg, Federated Media
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Enough With All The Web Toolbars! We’re Not In The 90′s Anymore!
Above is a screenshot of multiple toolbars being used here that I pulled from an experiment at Rev2.org. It includes a web toolbar from Krumlr, Ow.ly, Digg, and Facebook. When I see a screenshot like this, I cannot help but think how this reminds me of GeoCities circa 1990′s when there was that stupid web banner that dragged up and down as you scrolled through content pages. That banner alone helped contribute to the downfall of GeoCities.
The first one to come up with the toolbar out of all of the Web 2.0 companies was StumbleUpon. Their web toolbar was just an alternative to the Firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar. StumbleUpon just made it easier to use the service for those who did not have access to their own computers with the toolbar already installed.
But then Digg decided to replicate StumbleUpon’s web toolbar even though it was not necessary whatsoever. The community was much better off without the Digg toolbar. Given Kevin Rose is such an avid Twitter user and Digg wanted more traffic, this is why they created the toolbar and shortened the links for Digg.com URLs.
It didn’t stop at Digg. Facebook decided to get into the web toolbar game by creating that feature for shared links on the social network.
All of these web toolbars are doing something worse than what the GeoCities banners were doing back in the 90′s. These web toolbars are absorbing more traffic since it is their domain names being used but loading the content owner’s website in an iFrame.
By not getting the traffic that other websites are taking from you and if for some reason you aren’t getting the link-bank credit, then you could be potentially losing traffic. Fortunately for Pulse2.com, our main traffic sources are not from these content-stealing web toolbars. This is why I personally don’t mind it as much as many others.
For those of you out there that are using WordPress, there are some plugins available that automatically kill off the web toolbars. One of them is called “Frame Breaker, aka Die Digg-bar die!“
Categories Digg, DiggBar, Facebook, Ow.ly, StumbleUpon
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