NewsCloud.com Digg News

The Decline and Fall of Quality on Digg

Fueled partly by a need to counter false accusations from disgruntled community members who claim that Digg is rigged (i.e. that a core group of users decide what content is promoted), partly by the desire to encourage non-core members to participate more passionately, and partly by a need to affect a level of diversity and equality that would appear promising to potential acquirers, Digg has changed its algorithm again and again.

Yahoo Plans to Let Users Help Mold New Feature

The Buzz service borrows heavily from other so-called social news aggregators, like Digg and Reddit, as it asks users to vote on items they like. Items with the most votes, or buzz, will earn prominent placement. But the Buzz service is different in some important ways. Rather than turn Buzz into a Web destination for users, Yahoo plans to include the content that surfaces through Buzz on its front page.

Slashdot Founder Questions Crowds Wisdom

I try not to paint Digg as my arch-nemesis. The Digg method and Digg community are a wider audience than Slashdot, he said. But 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.

Just Sell Digg Already, Jay

TechCrunch urges Digg to sell out to corporate titans.

Digg users show who's the boss in Web 2.0 world

Digg founder Kevin Rose is smart enough to realize this (and, from a more practical standpoint, smart enough to realize that the cat was not just out of the bag but well on its way to Mexico). His ultimate if you can t beat em, join em decision to post the key on the Digg blog and vow to go down fighting was really the only thing he could do if he hoped to retain any sort of credibility.

I Bought Votes on Digg

Four and a half hours later, I was the only person who had dugg my story. That's when I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help "submitters" get Digg stories noticed by paying "users" to digg them.

Slashdot Firehose (or Digg vs Slashdot.org round 2) --Stewtopia

I got invited to Slashdot Firehose tonight as well. The UI is clunky and confusing and is very Digg-like, complete with thumbs up and thumbs down. I agree with Stew...Alexa data indicates Slashdot still in decline. Personally, I find myself drawn back to /. content because of the quality editorial and turned off by Digg. That's my 2 cents.

Slashdot Firehose (or Digg vs Slashdot.org round 2)

No Acquisition For Digg - Raise Series B Round Instead

Interestingly, the post claims Digg is not yet profitable despite earlier reports that it was. I expect to see some further changes in their model. This makes me doubt NewsVine's claim that it will be profitable early in 2007. By the way, Digg has 18 people - how many people do you think it takes to build NewsCloud?

New York Times adds sharing tool

The New York Times now allows readers to share with Digg and Newsvine ... and FaceBook(?). Interesting move. Seems experimental to me. Definitely a coupe for Newsvine because they seem to gain the most from the deal. The New York Times is also adding a permalink feature (wow?). Anyway, this won't apply to premium firewall content.

Digg Black Market

From Waxy: A site that sells Diggs on the social network site. Pretty funny. That's the price of success - in more ways than one.

Growth at Digg.com Has Leveled Off

Traffic growth is roughly tracking Slashdot again. Though Alexa measures Digg at more reach.

Experiment: 60 Days of Digg

Sturgeon's Revelation firmly applies to what's available online: 90% of it is crap. Clearly, it takes an informed and skilled team of editors to filter out the crap and present the rest in a coherent fashion. That's what Slashdot does. Digg's multitudes can't hope to accomplish that. After all, 90% of them are crap, too.

Top 100 Digg Users Contribute Most Front Page Content

Interesting analysis on Digg submissions. Does anyone know what Netscape offered top Digg users?

The Defiant Salmon: An Explosive Conversation With Digg.Com's Jay Adelson

We know there are limitations, and we also know how to address them, through greater transparency and additional tools to empower the people to moderate the site. Also, two years of research went into our promotional algorithms, so you can't just point to a clone's failure to work properly and say, "See? Digg's concept doesn't work!" when they simply work by raw numbers of votes, without the benefit of our research and intellectual property.