October 14th, 2008

Top Digger helps launch Tip'd, a Digg clone for financial news

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 5:01 am

Categories: Digg, Social News Sites

Tags: Digg, Financial, Social Media, Site, Tip'd, Financial Accounting, Finance, Steve O'Hear

Tip’d, which launched today, describes itself as “a place for investors… to meet, share, discuss, comment, and vote on what’s happening on both Wall Street and Main Street.” Essentially, it’s another Digg clone targeting a particular vertical. In this case, financial news.

Content categories include Commodities, Economy, Personal Finance, Stocks, and Tech. Instead of Digging a story submission, users vote by hitting the “Tip It” button. Just like Digg, only those stories that receive enough votes feature on the site’s homepage.

However, what makes Tip’d standout from similar Digg clones is the person appointed to help cultivate and manage the community — Muhamad Saleem. For it’s the community in which any social news site lives or dies by. Over the last few years Saleem has lived and breathed social media. He’s a top user on Digg itself, as well as being very active on other social media sites such as StumbleUpon and Reddit. He’s also a paid user of AOL’s own Digg clone Propeller, as well as a prolific blogger in his own right.

It’s also hard not to think that in a rather perverse way, the timing of the site’s launch couldn’t be better as the financial crisis means that all eyes are on the economy. Never before has Main Street paid so much attention to Wall Street. Read the rest of this entry »

October 9th, 2008

Kevin Rose: advertising, can you Digg it?

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 9:47 am

Categories: Digg, Net culture, Social News Sites

Tags: Digg, Advertisement, Steve O'Hear

Social news site, Digg, faces two big challenges going forward. How to expand its user-base (and therefore content) beyond its geeky roots, and in turn, how to increase ad revenue.

Speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference in London earlier today, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose spent considerable time addressing the first issue — how “to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance”, reports CNet’s Caroline McCarthy — but also revealed that the site is contemplating a new potential revenue stream: “Diggable ads”. Read the rest of this entry »

August 19th, 2008

Yahoo Buzz! opens up, let the gaming begin

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:43 am

Categories: Digg, Social News Sites, Yahoo

Tags: Digg, Yahoo! Inc., Games, Personal Technology, Steve O'Hear

Buzz, Yahoo’s social news site and “meme tracker”, has opened its submission process so that any site on the Web can now be ‘buzzed’. Prior to today, only select publishers were allowed into the program, with around 400 sites vying for the top prize of being featured on the Yahoo.com homepage.

Now that the submission process is open, it’s logical to presume that over zealous publishers and social media optimization types will begin to try and game Yahoo Buzz. This is exactly what Digg has faced during its ongoing teething period, and with the potential rewards of Buzz being even greater it’s inevitable that we’ll see the same. Read the rest of this entry »

June 30th, 2008

Digg's new "recommendation engine" could be a boon to advertisers

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 2:15 pm

Categories: Digg, Social News Sites

Tags: Digg, Advertiser, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Steve O'Hear

After what seemed like endless hints and pre-announcements, social news site Digg will finally start rolling out its “Recommendation Engine” this week.

Kevin Rose, writing on the official Digg blog, explains how the new feature takes a user’s “past digging activity” to identify “Diggers Like You” and “suggest stories you might like”.

The problem that Digg is attempting to tackle is that, as the site has grown, it’s become increasingly difficult to cut through all of the noise aside from visiting Digg’s front page which only displays stories that have garnered a sufficient number of votes (or “diggs”). In particular, the usefulness of the site’s “Upcoming” section hasn’t scaled now that there are more than 16,000 stories submitted everyday.

And in typical Web 2.0 fashion, the more you use Digg, the better recommendations you’ll receive, as the “engine” learns more about you. Read the rest of this entry »

June 18th, 2008

Reddit: open source not special sauce

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:54 am

Categories: Digg, Social News Sites

Tags: Digg, Reddit, Site, Open Source, Steve O'Hear

Social news site reddit today announced that it is open-sourcing the majority of the site’s code, including parts of the algorithm that determines what stories hit the front page.

“When we say ‘open-source’ we mean specifically that the code behind reddit is available to the public for download, and we’re inviting the public to submit code to help improve the site”, reads the official company blog.

And in a thinly disguised dig at competitor Digg (sorry Ed. I couldn’t resist) reddit says that, along with embracing the developer community who make up a large proportion of the site’s user base, they’ve “always strived to be as open and transparent with our users as possible, and this is the next logical step.”

Prominent members of Digg’s community have been highly critical of the site’s secrecy and lack of public accountability in terms of how the voting algorithm operates and why certain users have to work much harder than others in order to get stories voted onto Digg’s front page. By open-sourcing reddit’s codebase, the company looks a million times more responsive to its own community, and is certainly taking the moral high ground. Read the rest of this entry »

May 14th, 2008

Latest Flock Beta delivers Digg, Pownce and AOL Mail support

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:02 am

Categories: Browsers, Digg

Tags: Digg, America Online Inc., Twitter, E-mail, Web 2.0, Online Communications, Internet, Steve O'Hear

Having launched in late 2005 amidst a tsunami of web 2.0 hype, it was always going to be difficult for social web browser Flock to keep up with expectations. But after getting through what seemed like an unhealthy period of stagnation, update by update the software is really starting to deliver. And with the rise of social networking and micro-blogging services such as Twitter, the company’s newfound execution couldn’t be more timely. Read the rest of this entry »

March 17th, 2008

Yahoo Buzz! sending publishers into a traffic frenzy

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 9:10 am

Categories: Digg, Social News Sites, Yahoo

Tags: TechCrunch, Yahoo! Inc., Dallas Morning News, Steve O'Hear

Buzz, Yahoo’s three week-old social news site and “meme tracker” is proving to be a major blessing for publishers who are featured on the homepage, sending traffic in numbers that rival the Digg-effect. Perhaps unsurprising considering that some of the most “buzzed” stories are also given screen real-estate on Yahoo.com.

Yahoo tells ReadWriteWeb that Yahoo.com has sent approximately 16 million total referrals to just a subset of the publishers allowed into the beta during the first two weeks. Others stats handed over to RWW include: Read the rest of this entry »

March 7th, 2008

Who should buy Digg? Nobody, says community

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 9:24 am

Categories: Digg, Net culture, Social News Sites

Tags: Digg, Advertising & Promotion, Strategy, Marketing, Management, Steve O'Hear

Digg is reportedly up for sale, with Microsoft, Google and two unnamed media companies putting the social news site through due diligence. The price tag being somewhere in the 200+ million ball park, offering co-founders Rose and Adelson the exit strategy many suspect they’ve craved for months.

However, perhaps the most intriguing thing about a possible Digg sale isn’t how much its co-founders may pocket or even who will be the site’s new owner, but rather how a sale will impact on the community and, more importantly, page views. Read the rest of this entry »

February 26th, 2008

Yahoo launches "Buzz" - phew! not quite a Digg clone

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 9:47 am

Categories: Digg, Social News Sites, Yahoo

Tags: Digg, Yahoo! Inc., Story, Yahoo Launch, Yahoo Buzz, E-mail, Business Structures, Engineering, Online Communications, Finance

Ignoring the question of whether Buzz, Yahoo’s newly launched social news site and “meme tracker”, will go any way towards turning around the company’s fortunes (it won’t), I’m already a fan. It’s too easy to call the site a Digg-clone, but, like AOL’s attempts before it, Yahoo Buzz does borrow from and build on many of Digg’s best features. Read the rest of this entry »

February 26th, 2008

Digg town hall meeting is over - fighting spam answers all questions

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 9:25 am

Categories: Digg, Social News Sites

Tags: Digg, Cyberthreats, Spam, Engineering, Security, Spam And Phishing, Steve O'Hear

As promised, Digg held its first “town hall” meeting yesterday (via UStream), and although it was fun to see founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose answer questions in front of a camera — laptops in hand, Diggnation style — we didn’t really learn much new.

Almost all of the key questions (Bury Brigades, the algorithm, moderators etc.) can be answered in one sentence: Digg’s main priority is fighting spam.

There isn’t an auto-bury feature but Digg does maintain a black list of sites that are deemed repeat spammers or have tried to game the system. Digg does employ moderators - only one is on shift at any one time — the job of which is to weed out porn and other illegal content. Digg’s algorithm works hard to combat spam and encourage diversity by taking into account how diverse the pool of Diggers are for any one story. Nothing new learnt here.

On the issue of most importance to me - why Digg doesn’t display who has burried a story as it does for whose dugg it - the answer given is that it would encourage community fighting and unrest if you could see the people who spoilt your submission. In the future Digg may at least display a bury count.

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