Social Bookmarking


Internet and Social Bookmarking and Technology May 2nd, 2007 by HMTKSteve

There has been a lot of trouble at Digg in the last 24 hours. Some stories were posted that tell all about hacking the security for HD-DVD. At first Digg removed these stories and Jay Adelson blogged on the Digg blog about why.

This then blew up in their face and numerous stories began to appear on Digg with thousands of diggs telling Digg just what sort of people they are; spineless.

All over the blogosphere people are talking about this and, just when we though all hope was lost, Kevin Rose grew a pair and posted on the Digg blog about it.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Kevin Rose on the Digg Blog

Finally I get to say something nice about Kevin Rose again! It's been a long time coming but I'm glad you finally grew a pair and stood up for what Digg is supposed to represent. You may not be the Sixty Million dollar man yet but now you have some amount of honor and class.

Wait a minute. Did I fall for it? Did he grow a pair or did he just cave to the bigger group?

Is it possible that the diggers were so pumped up over this that to continue to anger them would only drive them away and kill Digg? After all, Digg is one of those web 2.0 companies that makes its money off of other people's work. Think about it, user generated content is just a fancy way of saying, "we make money off of other people's work."

Yeah, Kevin did grow a pair, but the pair he grew sprouted from his chest and not between his legs.

Think about it. This Hex code is now all over the Internet. Any trade secret status that HD-DVD had over that key is now effectively lost. So what if diggnation loses some sponsorship money from the HD-DVD people over this it would be a far bigger disaster to lose the diggers!

If anything, this particular episode shows us that digg is not about democracy it's about the bottom line. There is nothing wrong with being profit driven and cow-towing to your sponsors but, don't lie to us and tell us it's not true. If your sponsor, HD-DVD, called you on the phone and threatened to pull their sponsoring based on this just tell us. Tell us that you are beholden to your advertisers and that you will use your editorial powers to erase all content that places your advertisers in a negative light.

Kevin, you almost had me on this one... Almost!

Internet and Social Bookmarking April 26th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

A while back Digg announced some changes to their algorithm in regards to fixing their perceived gaming problem. There was a lot of shouting and back and forth on the subject but, eventually, things quieted down and people moved on.

In the intervening time I reported on a few cases of reverse gaming where people were using bury tactics to remove content similar to their own from the queue. This was very prevalent in the gaming sections of Digg as everyone was reporting on the same PS3/X-Box/Wii news of the day. I don’t know if Digg took notice of the overt “bury-game” being played and I don’t much care at this point.

What I’m about to tell you about is something else that I have recently discovered about Digg’s anti-gaming algorithm.

It seems that Digg has decided (in their infinite wisdom) that if a user routinely digs content submitted by a friend they mark this as gaming. Yep, your friends can sink your content just as quickly as you submit it! What ends up happening is that Digg identifies what it considers to be gaming and, when you apply your dig to the story, it gets buried!

Now, this is not an instant bury, not at all. The way it seems to work is that if a story is dugg up by a majority of your (mutual) friends it will be buried as a gamed story. The rational appears to be that since only your (mutual) friends are digging it up it must be bogus.

This is wrong on so many levels!

As an aside, there are now certain sites (belonging to friends of mine) that, if I dig a submission targeting that site, the submission will get buried by my digging it! The opposite holds true as well in that there are certain digg members who can kill a link to hmtk dot com just as quickly!

I’m tempted to go in and remove all my friends from dig but I’m just too lazy for that amount of work!

Internet and Social Bookmarking April 2nd, 2007 by HMTKSteve

Master BlasterIn the past, the top digg users were accused of controlling digg. Digg responded to this by dropping the top users list.

Some folks still think that the digg front page is controlled by a small minority of users. Well, they are partially right in that belief. Not right because the small group controls the content but right in the respect that so few stories make it to the front page that the end result is the same.

See, the vast majority of diggers never get a story promoted to the front page. It's not that there is a conspiracy but that it is a numbers game. Now that digg has over one million registered members it's virtually impossible for every member to get a story on the front page.

On most days, an average of 120 stories gets promoted to the front page of digg. Multiply this out by 365 days and you get an average of 43,800 front paged stories in a year. Even if every user tried to get a story promoted to the front page only 4.3% of users could even expect to get a story promoted! With over 5,000 stories submitted every day only 2.4% of them ever make it to the front page.

I have never thought that a cabal of "top diggers" controls the content that hits digg's front page. I have always thought the reverse, that the content decides who will become a top digger. Well, I used to believe that...

What I am finding more and more is that it is actually the "top dugg websites" that control what gets on digg.

Now, here me out on this.

A front page story on digg can translate into 25K hits easy. Heck, I recently received 15K hits from a story on digg's front page before they pulled it and that was all overnight/early morning traffic! That's a very tempting bit of traffic for a website owner.

That is why I think many of the "top dugg websites" are actually in control of what makes the digg front page. I'm not accusing digg of any involvement in this scheme but try this:

    Top Dugg Website Test

  • 1) Do a digg search (url only) for press.nintendo.com.
  • 2) Notice how few stories ever make the front page from this site?
  • 3) Do a digg search (url only) for a popular gaming site (that covers Nintendo) that is often on the digg home page.
  • 4) How many of those stories originated from Nintendo's press site?
  • 5) Think to yourself, why is this non-Nintendo site always making the front page when they are just reposting news from Nintendo's press site?

You can try this out in all the sections of digg, the results will be the same.

Certain websites are always on digg's homepage in their respective categories while others, who have the news first, are not.

Just the other day I saw a story hit the front page and when I went to read it, it ended with a source link to a lesser known site. The lesser known site had been submitted to digg first but its story was buried.

25K hits a day times 30 days equals 750K. That's a lot of traffic. You can charge advertisers a lot of money for traffic that high.

PS: Don't bother submitting this to digg, they don't want to hear from me.

Internet and Social Bookmarking March 21st, 2007 by HMTKSteve

This is strange. I was just taking a quick look over on Digg and after clicking on a story that was posted on a blog the direct Digg link took me right to duggmirror!

Digg Link
Story Link
Duggmirror link

This is very strange because the direct link to the story works fine! The blog is not down but up.

Has Digg finally listened to its critics and implemented this change so people will not be sent to sites that are down?

Internet and Social Bookmarking March 19th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

I must be real popular on the social bookmarking/news site I used to use because I recently encountered a clone of myself! Yes, someone on Digg is using my avatar!

My profile
My clone's profile

AvatarThough I do not own the image I used to create my avatar, I have been using it all over the net and it is not a common image. Not only that but it is a crop from a much larger image and it is clear this person just took my avatar and used it.

What's real funny is that he has been a Digg user for a few days longer then I!

I'm not sure how to take this...

What do you kind readers think I should do about this?

Social Bookmarking March 16th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

I discovered something this morning about the so-called "bury brigades"

I bury lots of crap that I find on Digg, when I still bother to go there but, this very morning, I was up early and I had Digg Spy loaded up.

What I saw was not a case of mass burying of certain sites though, it was far worse.

I was paying attention to the gaming area of Digg and I noticed something. Certain websites that are always on Digg's home page (in the gaming area) would have an article submitted and then, every other article on the same subject would start being buried. It did not matter which article came first.

This is clearly a case of Digg being gamed by selective use of the bury system and it is something Digg should take care of. They already watch for selective Digging, why don't they watch for selective burying?

Get with the program Digg. It is far easier to game Digg via the bury system than it is via the digg system.

I already know that anything submitted to Digg from my blog will be buried within minutes, though I don't see the buries on Digg Spy (I wonder why that is). Regardless of the state of my blog in the world of buries I feel this is a very important issue for Digg to look at. With the ability to drive tremendous amounts of traffic all over the web Digg needs to insure it is not being gamed, on either end.

Social Bookmarking March 13th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

Digg.com is a social news/bookmarking website. When it started out it was good and focused on Technology. Last year they opened up a series of new categories and took on a ton of new users.

It has since become a haven of fanboys and Stalinism. This is my top 11 list of things I have learned from Digg.

1. It's not who you know but how many friends you have.

2. A snappy headline is better than good content.

3. The amount of advertising you can have before being called a splog is inversely proportionate to your Alexa rating.

4. The power of burying a story is always stronger than that of digging a story.

5. Digg defines democracy as a voting system where some users votes are "more equal" than others.

6. The "Bury Brigade" would make Stalin proud.

7. Un-banned means you can submit the link and digg will auto-bury it for you.

8. Content that criticizes Digg is always buried as spam or inaccurate.

9. Stories with "Nintendo", "Wii", "Apple" or "Kevin Rose" always hit the home page.

10. If your name is "Kevin Rose" you will always have a 100% popularity rating.

11. No matter how hard you try, some sites can never be buried or banned.

For those who do not know what Stalinism is I present this quick excerpt from wikipedia:

It includes an extensive use of propaganda to establish a personality cult around an absolute dictator, extensive use of the secret police to maintain social submission.

Stalinism

Internet and Social Bookmarking March 8th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

Now that Digg is dead to me I need to find a new home for social news and bookmarking. I do still use Netscape and StumbleUpon for finding things of interest but I need something that is social aside from Netscape.

I enjoy commenting on articles and finding people with similar interests, does such a site exist?

In the spirit of my quest I took some time today to look at Plime.

According to the website:

Plime is a news aggregator, wiki (editable by all) and friend finder in one. It relies on the power of online community participation to control it's structure and editorial content. It's also a great place to meet others with similar interests.

I first noticed Plime when I was checking my server logs and I saw an influx of trafic from their site. Curious I took some time to look over their site and try it out.

    Good

  • Clean wiki-style interface
  • Collapsable category listing on the left side
  • Up and down voting is transparent
  • All submissions can have an image associated with them
  • You can customize your color scheme
  • No advertising
    Bad

  • Karma system easily abused to inflate a users power
  • No FAQ on site
  • Aggresive "don't come around here no more" moderators
  • Same content you will find on Netscape/Reddit/Digg

I went into Plime expecting a basic news aggregator type of site. I found a good variety of categories and a system designed to help you find people with similar likes. I even submitted two stories to see how the community would react. This is when things turned bad.

One particular user (may be a mod, no way to be sure) I ran into was actively taking the role of a cop. He dropped comments all over the site pestering posters about abusing the system or only posting articles that would result in personal gain.

I can understand moderating a community and looking out for content that does not belong but I got a very unfriendly vibe from Plime. I do not think I will be going back there again.

Don't just take my word for it, take a look at their website and make up your own mind.

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