At last night's Founders Club party in New York — an event for the self-important and those of us who fight for invitations to honor them — Digg CEO Jay Adelson finally cracked. "I remember when Valleywag and Digg used to have a good relationship," he told me. "What's happened?" Here's an idea, Jay.
Click to viewThe pace of of product launches from Yahoo is breathless — and with a whiff of desperation. On February 26, Yahoo plans to beta launch Yahoo Buzz as a competitor to Digg, and a tipster supplied Valleywag with screenshots. Buzz, built under the direction of VP Tapan Bhat, will begin with a limited number of publishers — about 100 — and will rank stories based on popular search results and user voting. By summer, Buzz will open to the entire Yahoo Publisher Network. In other words, if you let Yahoo sell ads on your site, it will allow your stories to appear on Buzz. Word is Yahoo plans to launch the site on buzz.yahoo.com, which currently tracks popular search results. Pics or it didn't happen? See the screenshots, below.
Simple: Use the headline your editor rejected to promote your story on the mob-run news dump. That's how Wired News writer (and Gawker Media alum) Megan McCarthy turned her story "Company Going After Yahoo Employees — in the Restroom" into " Company looks for quitter in the shitter." As more publications make online reporters earn pageviews, we've all got to learn how to play dirty. Also remember these three rules for Digg headlines:
"Art" is just another headline-filler word for "amazing." At least for children, who are the future, and geeks, who are the new trendsetter-influencer-coolhunters. Since K-12 art education is virtually dead, and no one reads books, these heavy Internet users have no preconceptions of art and they don't follow that world's big names. A new Cy Twombly or Lucien Freud painting won't get attention on Digg (Chris Ofili maybe, for the controversy), but a painted Lamborghini is one of the social news site's all-time favorite "art" posts. But it's not all bad. The Diggbrow movement isn't destroying art any more than the Dadaists or post-modernists did; it's reinventing it.
Digg and IAC's Ask.com search engine are getting close to launching an Ask-branded version of the popular headline-voting site. We'd heard in December that the two companies were working together. Indeed, the delay in the project's launch may have contributed to Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone's ouster. Without Lanzone, the project is continuing. IAC's hiring a general manager to run an unspecified website — which could well be the Digg-like news site.
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"A lot of these community news sites are all about Ron Paul. Ron Paul may be a valid candidate. But what that is really demonstrating is that you are seeing 1 or 2 percent of a community shaping where the whole community is going. A small dedicated group of people can manipulate these sites very easily... With sites like Digg, it's the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you're going to get." — Slashdot founder Rob Malda on Digg and other social news sites. [Bits]
Presidential candidate Barack Obama read the top ten list on David Letterman last night, counting down his top ten campaign promises. At No. 4: "I won't let Apple release the new and improved iPod the day after you bought the previous model." Puh-lease. It's enough to make you long for the good old days, when candidates pandered for votes in the polling booth, not on Digg.
After users submit a story, image or video to Digg, the site asks users to review similar submissions and make sure the new item isn't a duplicate of an existing article being voted for on the site. The tool is a marvel of modern precision. For example, notice how, in this accompanying screen shot, Digg's algorithm pairs a story on USB 3.0 with one on how "Men Aren't Washing Their Hands in The Restroom." Admit it. As a mere human, you never would have made the connection. Click to expand the image.
I've always preferred editorially controlled news sources like Fark and the Drudge Report. I'm more likely to find links that I think are interesting. On "social news" sites like Digg, readers get endless Ron Paul and Apple links, as fanboys constantly vote for their preferred subjects. Occasionally though, something else makes it to the top of the social news pile.
"For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever. These sites often get submitted to Digg and then are invariably buried after a certain amount of time." So claims an open letter posted to Valleywag yesterday. The mythical Digg auto-bury list is one of those Internet legends that everyone who's anyone knows about, but no one can produce. Several bloggers have published lists, but none of them have also published a reproducible methodology for determining that list. The score: Gossip 1, Scientific Method 0. Unless the four self-styled "most powerful users in the community" present their own list of banned sites — not one or two URLs, but "dozens" to quantify their claim, along with instructions for obtaining that list yourself — they're even worse rumormongers than we are.
Kevin Rose started Digg specifically to give users the power to decide what's news. It must be a pain to see some of his top users quit the site and write an open letter charging him with "disregard for the Digg community," "lack of transparency," and "flagrant disrespect of top users." They were angry that a sudden change in the site had lessened their influence. This may seem like an intramural tiff, but these users are known for submitting thousands of stories to Digg, driving up to several hundred thousand visits to each story that makes the front page. Gawker Media alone owes millions of pageviews to Digg. And this isn't the first time top users have grumbled. So Rose and his CEO Jay Adelson made a surprisingly sensible move: Late last night, they chatted live with the disgruntled users. Here's why Rose frustrated his top users, why he bothered talking to them, and why it's a lesson for all online media.
The following is an open letter for Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and the rest of the Digg management, given to us by a number of top Digg users who have been unable to get any sort of dialogue going with the company which operates the social news site. Valleywag does not endorse this letter, but we like the idea of hearing from Digg about what's going on. And because the whole ruckus is entertaining.
Yesterday, Digg went down for an hour in the middle of the day. Initially we thought it was an unplanned outage, but it turns out that a number of changes were made to the algorithm that controls which stories are "promoted" to the front page. The changes have started a mini-revolt among the top submitters reminiscent of the community uprising over Digg's deletion of HD-DVD unlock codes last year. We talked to several top diggers to find out what changed, why they're upset, and we have our own theory for why the changes were made.
Hope your blog post didn't just make the front page of Digg.com! The site is offline — in the middle of the day no less — while "changes" are made. We've got no idea what the changes might be, but unexplained downtimes in the middle of a business day suggests an unplanned outage. Got the scoop? Shoot us an email at tips@valleywag.com.
Tom Cruise has personally, PERSONALLY, been pwned. This weekend, an anonymous Internet group (named Anonymous — these are not masters of subtlety) started a war with the Church of Scientology by hammering the group's web site; Scientology.org is down after a brief traffic spike. This isn't the only group of Internet users unafraid of the intimidating cult; a whole range of sites has turned the Church into a mockery by doing what mainstream celebrity-coverage outlets wouldn't dare. Here's a guide to the war (and a creepy manifesto made by The Internet!).
"Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inaccurate." So reads the creatively capitalized disclaimer now placed on the Digg discussion page for "Digg's secret editors," in which I revealed that Digg's so-called moderators use their own judgment to override Digg's supposedly all-powerful algorithm. The consequences are stunning: Digg is not a democracy of news, and the way headlines make their way to Digg's homepage are neither fair nor transparent. Digg cofounder Kevin Rose weighed in with an oddly worded nondenial.
