NICK DOUGLAS — Class, let's learn a simple rule: Copyright violation? Still a viable business model. Explicitly violating the terms of service for a social site with a dedicated userbase that can spot and ban abusers? Not gonna work. Subvert and Profit, a just-launched market for buying and selling votes on Digg.com (a buck to buy a digg, 50 cents to sell), is the Mechanical Turk that doesn't work.
Techcrunch's Michael Arrington fires a widely linked broadside entitled "Digg Should Sue Wired." At issue is Wired's article about successfully gaming Digg, Wired's supposedly overall negative attitude toward Digg, and the inappropriateness of Wired attacking Digg since it shares a corporate parent with Reddit, a Digg competitor. Unfortunately, every one of Arrington's conclusions is wrong. He's a smart guy, and one almost suspects the post was precisely engineered to draw response-traffic from knee-jerk hell-yeahs and naysayers alike. So, let's oblige him.
First, let's just dispose of the conspiracy theory. Wired and Reddit are indeed both owned by Condé Nast. Anyone who has dealt with Condé Nast — especially its internet tentacles — knows that it is a monolithic, lumbering, hydra-headed beast with (at least) a dozen different departmental channels for accomplishing anything online. They've gotten some of their magazine properties properly web-oriented in the past few months, but only just. The idea that such a tiny, rather toothless, and yet coordinated attack on Digg would occur via Wired on behalf of Reddit at the behest of Condé Nast is patently ludicrous. Not to mention that Wired, for all its faults, hardly seems the type of rag to submit itself to such tool-hood.
Arrington's first point is that Wired called Digg "the New Friendster" without mentioning their relationship to Digg competitor Reddit. What Arrington doesn't bother noting is that this was one line of a crystal-ball listicle entitled "Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007." There are also similarly negative predictions for Google, Myspace, and the New York Times. Should those also require disclosures detailing any potential conflicts with Condé Nast or its subsidiaries? I'm sure Si Newhouse himself insisted they put in that part about Myspace, just to piss off Rupert Murdoch.
So then, Arrington moves on to the newest Wired article ("I Bought Votes on Digg"). Arrington grudgingly admits that the Reddit connection is in fact disclosed, "albeit in a parenthetical in the middle of the story." Of course, that's how such conflicts are routinely disclosed, in this thing we call journalism. In fact, Arrington himself calls the article "a piece of investigative journalism," then turns round and roasts it for being investigative. That is, gaming Digg for an article about gaming Digg is "making the news," rather than reporting it. No, it's investigating the news, and testing and verifying the news you're reporting.
If anything, the Digg article is a welcome relief from Wired's far more typical brand of dewey-eyed futurism. It's never fun being the target of an investigative piece, but getting all hot and bothered over the investigation is a historically standard reaction from parties who strike at the methods because they don't like the results.
There's more and more anxious hand-wringing over the Digg "Bury Brigade" — i.e., secretly and/or informally allied Digg users who purposefully bury Digg stories that are unflattering to Digg or which represent unfriendly viewpoints. The most amusing thing about the "debate" is watching such stories turn up on Bigspy, one of the visual representation toys created by Digg Labs. First there were stories about Digg, then stories about Digg burying those stories, which themselves were buried. And now you're reading a post about those stories which likely won't even end up on Digg, but if it did, it would totally be buried. And you could watch the meta-magic happen! In real time!
MEGAN MCCARTHY — Last night marked a soiree at Slide for Revision3, the net TV net brought to you by the fine folks at Digg. Indie mag XLR8R has joined the outfit with XLR8R TV; mag founder Andrew Smith says the show covers "cutting-edge music and culture." (Also, the host of the show is named — no joke and completely coincidentally — Vivian Host.) Slide is a newish club partially owned by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams (he was there, but left before I could be introduced). Slide's speakeasy theme perplexingly includes an actual slide patrons can use to enter the club; is this how it was done back in Prohibition? At least two people copped to using the slide last night. "It's a lot better in a speedo," said one. As are so many things. Full gallery of fotographic fun may be found here, courtesy of lenswoman Lane Hartwell. After the jump, our report and a sample of the visual entertainment.
George Lucas's entertainment company has filed opposition to social media site Digg's attempt to trademark its name. The dispute is based on Lucasart's 1995 video game, "The Dig." A helpful Digg commenter points out that potential consumer confusion could be alleviated by simply noting that one of these things is a 12-year-old game, and the other is a "website full of megalomaniacs."
Yahoo launched their "swanky new community-based recipe for collecting feedback" yesterday, naming the baby Yahoo Suggestions. Tis Digg-like indeed, and Diggers are none too happy about the similarities. Missing is the ability to be negative — you can vote for a suggestion, but not against. Anyway, the angry Digglers are converging in the Autos board, as it was the first to go live. Their posts are getting trashed rather quickly, but you can still catch the tail end of the train wreck.
MEGAN MCCARTHY — Digg loves itself, and Digg loves Kevin Rose, and Kevin Rose loves Diggers. Hence Diggnation Live, a Rose-led podcast, Digger social event, and drinky party at the Beach Chalet on Ocean Beach. Or, as one attendee said, "It's a frat party for people who never left their room in college!" Diggers from all over certainly left their rooms to get here, hailing from Sacramento, Santa Cruz, and some strange land known as "Minn-eh-soh-tah." Bemused local surfers were cruelly shoved aside by scruffy nerds who took over half the bar, keeping the doors open to let in the coastal chill. Sundry Diggers, babies, dogs, and film crews rounded out the circus. Check out the amazing gallery of joy shot by Lane Hartwell, and journey after the jump for party notes and photo highlights.
Outside the Beach Chalet, a tent "simulcasted" the Diggnation podcast to an audience of zero, since all Diggfans were clustered inside around the bar and its sweet, sweet alcohol. Rose and interlocutor Alex Albrecht mugged for the crowd, doing the podcast thing between rounds. Digger chrispcade came up from Sacramento because "It's so close". A family of three from three hours north — including a 10-month-old who really should have had his ID checked — stopped by on their way to Tahoe. One guy named Michael, visiting from the Midwest, wanted to see Diggnation because "You don't have this in Minnesota". Then there's Katie, a.k.a. katiedesu, who came up from Santa Cruz to show off her homemade Digg shirt (hastily thrown together in 30 minutes because the blue Digg shirt she had ordered failed to arrive in time). Since social media is The Shit right now, local media types all but pounced on super-cute Katie, including a film crew; look forward to her appearance on the Discovery Channel.
Rose worked the crowd amicably, as did a few other leading lights. At one point during the podcast, he and Albrecht held up a copy of JPG magazine open to an arty picture of nearly naked woman with star-shaped pasties. That pic was shot by none other than Valleywag's own Lane Hartwell, whose photos grace this very post. Synergy! Later, Digg t-shirts and other swag were hurled into the crowd, temporarily sating their bloodlust.
A local beardling observed the proceedings with confusion. "I'm just here for the band. I heard they were taking an hour break and couldn't believe it." Dreadlocked surfer dude Marc pronounced the Digger crowd "corporate," and I don't think he meant that in a good way. Bartender Nick, who was serving drinks in the background the during the podcast, had never heard of Digg before his prominent cameo. At the end of the night, he wrote down "Diggnation" in capital letters, murmuring that he ought to check it out.
Below are a few photo picks from the evening. Plenty more here.
In addition to sporting one of the most hilarious illustrations ever to appear in the Wall Street Journal, the "Wizards of Buzz" article trend piece on social media "influencers" really should be the reddest of red-meat linkbait, right? So how's the article doing on the sites it mentions?
Digg - 420 diggs as of this writing. Not bad, but not stellar. Reaction ranges from congratulatory to disappointment and getting interviewed but not quoted.
Reddit - 82 points. Much investigation into the identify of Reddit user "Adam Fuhrer," a supposed 12-year-old from Toronto. More here.
StumbleUpon - 435 stumbles. Little comment.
Del.icio.us - No sign of the WSJ article getting much bookmark love. 287 bookmarks actually.
Newsvine - 31 votes. Discussion is all citizen-journalish, of course.
Netscape - 95 votes. Commentary somehow devolves into a strange internecine squabble. Jason Calacanis present, though uninvolved in squabble.
NICK DOUGLAS — Digg grew from a tight community of power web users and fans of founder (and former Tech TV star) Kevin Rose. Now it's a popular destination that sends hundreds of thousands of users to dozens of sites a day. As Digg's role on the Internet has changed, Rose and his team have had to adapt how the site works. But some changes seem counterintuitive. What does it mean that this week, the site stopped honoring its "Top Diggers"?
The more traffic your web site gets, the better — unless it's Digg traffic. Getting dugg can bring server-crushing loads of traffic to a site, but readers coming from Digg spend, on average, 3.6 seconds on a site before they bounce off to the next flavor of the moment. Either they're really fast readers, or they're just looking at the pictures. It's even worse when Digg readers stick around, because they'll litter your comments with increasingly strident and off-topic remarks. "The worst in human behavior comes and sits on your front porch, begging for your attention," complains the search engine consultant who analyzed Digg users' behavior. Now she just wants Diggers to — please! — stop bothering her.
NICK DOUGLAS — As U.S. intelligence has noted, the Internet harbors millions of dangerous extremists who reject reason and order in favor of hatred and terrorism. And they just won't shut up about their Macs. I've identified three of these sects (Freepers, Diggers, and YouGoobs), profiled them, and explained how to deal with them with minimal bloodshed.
NICK DOUGLAS — A Business 2.0 blogger yesterday blew up Google's tweaked Zeitgeist (which tracks gainers, not top searches). He also deconstructed the PR-friendly "top" lists made by AOL and Yahoo (revealed: AOL's real top searchword is "google"). But what are the top searches on sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, and Craigslist?
NICK DOUGLAS — Digg may not be heaven, but it's sure damn close. If you enter this big weird world of Diggers, submitters, and buriers, you'd better know who you're dealing with.
"We're on the same trajectory that Digg was at the beginning," Netscape head Jason Calacanis said onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit today about his social news site's main competitor. But that's not what one online stat tracker says. According to Alexa, Netscape's traffic has fallen since he revamped the site, despite Calacanis's claim that they're adding a thousand users a day.
