Written on 1st July 2009
11 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Digg today announced (in their own words) “major updates to our dupe detection technology and content submission process that should go a long way in eliminating duplicate submissions.”
Clearly the site needs to go back to the drawing board because as I write this, two stories with almost equal amount of Diggs, posted at similar times sit awkwardly underneath each other on the Digg front page.
To prove I’m not making this up, this is one story and this is the other and here is a screenshot (more…)
Written on 4th June 2009
13 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
After ending their exclusive ad deal with Microsoft one year early, Digg has just announced plans to let their users Digg or in fact, bury their forthcoming advertisements.
The new advertising platform, appropriately called Digg Ads will give users control over what advertisements they see and, interestingly, how much the advertiser pays. The more an advertisement is dugg, the less the advertiser is charged and conversely, the more an ad is buried the more expensive it will become for the advertiser and consequently, the advertiser will eventually be priced out of the system.
The new ad platform will launch as a pilot (equivalent to a beta?) for a few months whilst they work out how best to run the system.
According to Mike Maser, Digg’s latest recruit and new Chief Revenue Officer:
“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.”
A screenshot was provided to give a better idea of how it’s likely to look:
What’s immediately obvious and rather surprising is that the ads aren’t your standard 300×300 flash squares but rather like your standard Digg story, blended in amongst the other standard Digg stories. This is unquestionably likely to attract the eye more and with any luck, increase number of impressions, and hopefully prevent “Adblock Plus” and other ad-blocking tools from hiding them. Sites like Digg (and us!) need ads to stay alive and this is a creative way to actually make ads interesting.
Whilst both interesting and inspiring in many respects, Kevin Rose & Co must realise the blatant loopholes within the system. Aside from potential competitors burying ads, they’ll need to deal with Apple fan boys who’ll instinctively bury Microsoft ads, marketing agencies who will simply give up in frustration unable to create ads Digg users are satisfied with and all that aside, each ‘ad’ is likely to have to deal with the masses of typical Digg commentary slating every aspect of it and the company behind it.
That’s not to say there aren’t ways to make it work, but the team at Digg have a mission ahead of them and it won’t be easy.
On a drawing book, Internet could be described as the flower of knowledge exploration, a place to explore mankind’s knowledge virtually, and contributing to that. What a useful contribution to our lives! However, our Internet is a lot less boring. After merely 36 years of development, Internet became the quick-fix for boredom at the office. Forget about knowledge, who doesn’t want to see a cute kitty or discuss breakup words to end your relationship?
In my opinion, there has been an staggering trend going on with the social media sites. While Slashdot is still (and probably always will be) moving along with it’s core crowd discussing tech, Digg grew from being a tech site, to… a tech site – adding images of cute little kitties and latest Failblog in the process. For quite some time, Twitter has been THE place to discuss, well… Twitter, a topic that merely expanded to ‘fail wales’ along the way. More recently, interesting contributions came along, which made the platform interesting, but in the post-Oprah Twitter-era, the network seems to have evolved to a place to discuss “lies girls tell” and “breakup words”.
Perhaps this observation is just me, but doesn’t it suck that these social networks are being ridiculed to pointless time wasters? Don’t even get me started on Facebooks “quiz” revolution (have you noticed that), or the amazing amount of useless content that Yahoo Answers is producing. I wonder if social networks lose a lot of their value due to deteriorating content that is published on them. Social Networks should (and Digg failed in this) facilitate new ways to present their data to their audience to keep the network interesting, otherwise, it is doomed to lose their audience on the long run.
Let me draw up the ‘evolution of topics’ for you, as I have experienced it:
At a Digg Townhall meeting yesterday Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced that they are planning to remove the ‘Shout’ option from Digg and offer a new share option to “streamline your ability to share on Facebook and Twitter.”
Good riddance if you ask me because the only shout’s I ever received were basically spam. Digg has been actively focusing on introducing new features and focusing on innovation which is a good thing. As you can see in the below graph Twitter has passed Digg in visits last months:
A few days ago I posted about the benefit of getting retweeted versus dugg. It seems Digg came to a similar conclusion long before I did and started working on new features to take better advantage of the microblogging phenomena.
Check out this extensive review and in-depth analysis on RWW about the move from Shouts to Tweets and Facebook status updates.
The image below here shows why in the age of Twitter, Digg is starting to get less interesting to bloggers. Making it to the front page of Digg is still cool but just as hard (maybe even harder) as it was 3 years ago. Having your message retweeted is a lot easier. Also, 1 Digg doesn’t get you any traffic. 10 Diggs? No traffic. 100 Diggs? Well, only if it makes it to the ‘Upcoming’ section.
A retweet is ALWAYS good for traffic. I just checked the last 10 visitors from Twitter. They had a combined audience of 8116 followers, an average of 800 followers per user. One retweet potentially reaches those 800 followers.
In reality the reach of a retweet is a lot lower, of course. My guess is that a retweet gets an average 5% clickthrough. A link posted to 1000 followers generates 50 visitors. On average. A lot of our posts here get retweeted 50 or 100 times. You do the math.
Now take another look at the graph at the top. That graph is true for Blogs but doesn’t apply to retweets. Blogs need to be original. No point in writing about the same thing twice. Retweets are different. The whole purpose of a Retweet is to, well, repeat.
So, Tweetmeme is twice as interesting for us as bloggers than Digg. Digg is a zero-sum game. You either make it to the frontpage, or not. A retweet is always useful and it never gets dull.
The same goes for Techmeme. Making it to Techmeme is hard. You need to be first AND important enough to matter. I have always been disappointed however when we did make it (i’d say we make it to Techmeme about once a week) because although people seem to think this is a big deal I hardly ever saw any traffic coming from it.
Tweetmeme is a completely different beast. Make it to the front page of Tweetmeme and you see traffic! Lots of it! Which might also explain the surge of traffic to TweetMeme recently:
It is amazing that Digg didn’t/hasn’t/won’t launch TweetMeme functionality and the same goes for TechMeme. Just as Digg took away the throne from SlashDot it looks like TweetMeme is on track to do the same to Digg.
Of course this doesn’t mean we don’t WANT to make it to the Digg front page! If you definitely absolutely want to Digg this post we won’t stop you. Just don’t forget to retweet it too. ;-)
Written on 17th May 2009
9 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
We posted a story last week about Ivy Bean, a woman who at 104 years old had become the worlds oldest Twitterer. We initially heard about the story via The Telegraph, thought it was rather interesting and shared it with you guys, and by the number of retweets, you rather liked it too.
A day or so later, MG Siegler over at TechCrunch noticed The Telegraph’s story climbing up the Digg ladder and wrote a story titled “Did the UK Press Con A 104-Year-Old Woman Into Joining Twitter For Digg Bait?”. OH THE IRONY.
Firstly, you might con a person into giving you their watch, you might even con a person out of their life savings but you don’t con a person to join Twitter. If they did get her to join, I’m certain they would have paid – and most likely rather handsomely.
Secondly, however she joined Twitter, she’s still Tweeting as we speak – in fact, her last Tweet was just 30 minutes ago (at the time of writing).
Thirdly, and probably most significantly, who cares? It was a story which intrigued people, made people smile and did absolutely zero harm to anyone involved. Sadly, that is not the case with other newspaper and blog stories which have of many occasion lead to individuals/company reputations taking a steep dive due to a completely fabricated story. This is clearly not a completely fabricated story.
Written on 4th May 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
As part of Digg’s Digg Dialogg series, Arianna Huffinton sat down with Sir Richard Branson on Virgin America’s inaugural flight from San Francisco to Orange County.
Digg Dialogg lets you submit your questions to notable leaders and luminaries. Rather than editors or journalists, the Digg community decides the most popular questions to be posed in the interview.
Written on 21st April 2009
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
I have to hand it to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, he has a wonderfully persuasive yet amicable approach to extracting details from his interviewees – not always successful – but never boring to watch.
His most recent interview, posted over at TechCrunch (and below), features Digg’s Kevin Rose and whether you’re a Digg fan or not, I highly recommend giving it a watch. Arrington ‘digs’ (sorry) deep into the early days of Digg, the numerous rounds of funding, acquisition/sale attempts and even (at the very end) Rose’s crush on Jennifer Anniston.
Going Real Time
From a tech perspective however, Rose announces that Digg are moving in a completely new direction, one that will guarantee to make you think “that’s a ballsy move”. Whilst refusing to share specific details, Rose does say that it’s time for Digg to get a “more real-time in nature” and become a “living and breathing site”. It’s difficult to pin point precisely what that means but if there’s one thing that Digg is noticeably slow at, it’s ‘breaking news and discussions’ on the homepage. It takes time, quite often hours, before a breaking story makes the front page because of the number of Digg’s it takes to get there. It’ll be interesting to see whether the ‘real time’ future of Digg aims to resolve that.
The Digg Bar
Rose opens up frankly about the Digg bar, and in my opinion, does a solid job at putting the malarkey behind it into perspective. I think it’s natural for most users and outsiders to believe Digg’s motive are entirely selfish and solely focused on ensuring Digg grows and keeps the traffic it generates. (more…)
Written on 15th April 2009
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Launched just a few days ago, the DiggBar was initially met with some excitement, however it wasn’t long before excitement turned to frustration and people began voicing theirs.
Digg, despite its size and on many levels proving the DiggBar to be a success, have once again listened to their users and made alterations to exactly how the DiggBar works.
Here’s the run down:
1. If you are a Digg member and have selected not to see the bar (in settings), you will never see the bar.
2. If you are not a Digg member, you will never see the bar.
3. If you are a Digg member but not logged in, you will never see the bar.
Need to give credit where it’s due, Digg have listened and with just a small change to how the bar actually works, it should leave most users content that they can control whether they see it or not.
I expect further customization options to appear soon. The ability to only see the DiggBar when one of your (Digg) friends have Dugg the post or when the post has already received over 300 Diggs for example would be a welcome addition. That should ensure you’ll only need to view the DiggBar on Digg worthy content.
Note. Although confirmed, you should see these changes should be implemented over the next few days.
Written on 10th April 2009
2 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Digg’s search facility has always been a frustration. Noticeably slow and sluggish, with results that made it difficult to find what you were actually looking for.
Yesterday however, the site launched its all new “no longer sucks” (in their own words) Digg Search, and yes – take it from me – it is radically improved.
On testing it out yesterday, the speed was by far my favorite improvement – searching and producing results faster than a blink of an eye. In the past I resorted to switching tabs and reading the news in between searches!
Other features include a multi-faceted filtering system, allowing you to filter by Digg count, topic, time and even website. RSS feeds are now available for search results, allowing you to receive new items that match particular queries directly in your RSS reader. Digg have also added a shortcuts and common Google-like search queries, again improving the ability to find what you want. (more…)
Written on 1st July 2009
11 COMMENTS 
Written on 29th May 2009
Written on 20th May 2009
I have to hand it to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, he has a wonderfully persuasive yet amicable approach to extracting details from his interviewees – not always successful – but never boring to watch.
Launched just a few days ago, the DiggBar was initially met with some excitement, however it wasn’t long before excitement turned to frustration and people began voicing theirs.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
