Crenk » digg

Digg Launches Trends. See What Are The Hot Topics on Digg

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:35:04 +0000

Twitter’s Trending Topics is a great way to see what’s buzzing, what’s going one and what’s happening in the world. Often, big stoies are made publicaly aware on Twitter trends before they hit mainstream news. Several times I’ve watched BBC World News when the presenter used Twitter trends as a source.

Now Digg are launching a new trends experiment which will follow in the footsteps of Twitter. However it’s not just a carbon copy.

The trends feature will display stories that people are digging fast but only recently. The idea is to catch big stories in their initial phases before they hit mainstream media.

Here is what the official Digg blog reads about the new experiment:

Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there.

How does it work? Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage. Here’s an example of what a Digg Trend might look like:

The goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not. We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible.

27 Circular Social Media Icons in 3 Sizes

Steven Finch — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 09:37:03 +0000

I have been after some great social media icons for a long time and I have finally come across a great set. All icons are circular and of the highest quality. Icons include AIM, Bebo, eBay, Hi5, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Windows Live, Ning, Orkut, Twitter and more.

Download: Social Media Icons Pack 2.0 (.rar), Social Media Icons Pack 2.0 (.zip)

Great Digg Promotion Algorithm Flow Chart

Steven Finch — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:45:36 +0000

I have thought for a long time now that Digg isnt really a place any more for small to medium size blogs. Here is a great example of Digg these days.

MySocialButtons: Find Social Networking Buttons and Icons for Your Blog or Site

Steven Finch — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:00:55 +0000

Have you ever spent a lot of time searching around the Internet to find the perfect social media button that can be added to your site? Well stop searching and head over to MySocialButtons. MySocialButtons does what it says on the can and offers free social networking icons and buttons to download. Buttons include TTwitter, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon and come in various different colours, styles and sizes.

iPhone App Reviews for Social Media News

Jordan Kasteler — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:16:14 +0000

There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.

Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?

I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.

Shovel – Digg App

Author: Scott Fitzhugh

Price: Free

Ratings: 147 Reviews – (at the time of writing)

iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/d5yqhu

iTunes Description:

Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.

Personal Review:

Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:

Popular Stories
Top Stories
Movers & Shakers
Brand New Stories

All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.

Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”

Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.

In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:

Overview

Pros

Easy to use
Clean interface
Ability to access all Digg content

Cons

Free of charge
Can’t Digg, comment, or bury content
No Digg account profile/community features or functionality

iReddit

Author: CondeNet

Price: $1.99

Ratings: 41 Reviews (at the time of writing)

Feedback Contact: http://getsatisfaction.com/reddit/products/reddit_ireddit

iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/ce6tt2

iTunes Description:

The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.

All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.

Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.

It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.

And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.

Personal Review:

The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.

Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:

Programming
Funny
Science
Tech
World News
Entertainment
Business
Comics
Gaming
Best Of
Economics
Cappuccino

It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.

I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.

Overview

Pros

Easily vote on stories from the actual story page
Save links to view/read later
Comment participation
Customization of footer subreddits

Cons

Most expensive Reddit app
Not a wide-range of subreddits to customize on your footer
Can’t browse all subreddits
No search functionality
No personal account status functionality

Open Source Reddit

Author: Joseph Pintozzi

Price: Free

Ratings: 10 Reviews (at the time of writing)

Feedback Contact: reddit@pintozzi.com

iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cpjzvj

iTunes Description:

The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.

Personal Review:

This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:

reddit.com
bacon
politics
pics
WTF
funny
technology
programming

The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.

Overview

Pros

Open Source
Free

Cons

No commenting
No voting
Can’t browse all subreddits
No search functionality
No personal account status functionality

Satellite Reddit

Author: 3Cube Technologies

Price: $0.99

Ratings: 8 Reviews – (at the time of writing)

Feedback Contact: satellite@3cubetechnologies.com or http://twitter.com/3cube

iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cx8eec

iTunes Description:

Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.

Change in this version includes:

Greatly improved performance
New, Controversial, and Top views are available for all subreddits
An overlay displaying the full article title and comments count shows while loading an article
The subreddit list is reorderable
A beautiful new icon and splash screen have been added
New lower pricing.

Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.

Additional Satellite features include:

Shake the app at any time to explore random content from Reddit
Next/previous buttons are available at the screen edges to move through content without returning to list view
Full portrait/landscape modes, including upside down. Great for handing the phone across the dinner table to share your discoveries!
Returns to the content you were browsing at start-up. Pick up right where you left off when that call came in.
Highly addictive content discovery available anywhere, at any time!

Personal Review:

This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.

This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.

Overview

Pros

Personalized
Nice User-Interface
Good functionality for voting and commenting
All Reddit content accessible through this app

Cons

Isn’t free
Can’t see your karma points
No search functionality

HAPPY BROWSING WITH THESE SOCIAL MEDIA APPS!

Regator: The Blogospheres Best Information Aggregation Portal

Steven Finch — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:22:22 +0000

Finding quality articles can be time consuming in today’s era where we are hooked to reading interesting and worthwhile info on topics we like. Regator is such an aggregator portal which searches and provides interesting articles and latest news and happenings in technology, health, entertainment, sports, and latest happenings in business and finance sector, all organized and categorized at one place.

Regator is a portal where you can find links to various interesting article published on web from time to time. So you don’t have to search and keep looking for an hour for something useful and interesting to read. The Site has various categories where you can find articles of that niche and click on the link to read it. Actually regator has a team of few people who work to search these articles from sites and blogs that provide quality content and put them at one place for people to read.

You can even search posts and articles on your favorite reality shows or episodes. There is a ’search’ and even ‘advanced search’ feature for you to search for specific reviews of products like your favorite ‘iPhone’ or cool new ‘Nokia N97’ and you will find tons of posts on it. Also you can register on site and rate the posts you read on regator and the highest rated articles are shown on the front page of regator, just like the other social bookmarkers like Digg. You can personalize a lot on regator including organizing, saving and rating your favorite articles and posts.

Not only does it have article search but also audio and video posts for those who like watching more than reading. If you specifically like reading content from blog, they also have that search category – ‘Blog results’ on front page. Regator has nearly 2 millions posts archived by them till now. Its actually archiving the best of weblogs content and presenting it in a organized and searchable way.

(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Sagar Trapasia from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog.

Front Page of Digg Impossible? Try HYPick For Better Results

Luis Sandoval — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:31:06 +0000

Often, users of Digg comment how they enjoy some of the content, but that readers notice that the same individuals get their

HYPick Logo

stories on the front page time and time again. Users that try their hardest to get their stories on the front page fail more often than not, leaving many to wonder if the site is truly leveraging the wisdom of the crowds or if the system is being gamed.

I won’t get into that discussion, you can find plenty of content on that if you search. What I do want to focus on is an alternative to the Digg’s, Reddits, and other supposed community news sites. Enter HYPick, from the creative mind of social media strategist, Oren Todoros. His vision of truly representing the wide swath of internet users is visualized with this social news site that heavily encourages it’s users to HYPE their favorite stories and articles.

On HYPick there’s no specialized voting system, or fancy magic attached to stories, it’s purely at the mercy of the community. Articles with the most activity are ranked higher. So as users come and go, read and comment, links and pass on, the article gains momentum as something the community feels should be read by others.

No good vote, bad vote system, just real people participation!

There is no doubt that the passions of the community will have a voice. Many would call this a level playing field, that will remain to be seen. For now the HYPick community is alive and well and already gaining momentum.

The Purpose

Putting power into the hands of the users has been what most community news sites have been after. Accomplishment is iffy at best, but no one can deny the current reign of those sites that have dominated this arena for several years. HYPick’s unique approach will truly test the vision that Oren and his team have put together.

In order to make HYPick the next attractive playground for user submitted news stories, they have integrated two HYPick specialized widgets for their users.

The first:

HYPick Reader

The reader widget which can be placed on the right side of your site. It provides easy access for your readers to see what is being ranked and spoken about on HYPick, but also gives you the ability to quickly jump to the post of interest.

I can even appreciate how the posts can also show imagery when they appear on this list. HYPick did a great job with this widget ensuring that users of their service will always have instant connectivity to the happenings in the community. Detail wise I’m not too sure if there are limitations to the articles listed on this widget, whether they are selected as highly ranked posts rated by the community, or if any post that is put to the community is automatically listed here. Still, HYPick wants to make sure that the community is always involved.

Of note the widget is customizeable to a point, but again, it shows HYPicks dedication to the opinion of its readers!

The second HYPick add-on is this:

HYPick Website Button

In it’s continued effort to ensure that readers and users alike are constantly connected to the community, you can integrate the HYPick icon onto your site, similar to what Digg and Reddit due with their icons. This will notify readers that your post can be placed on the community site for involvement by all. The icon is set up to be unobtrusive yet functional in its duty.

Overall the entire system seems pretty sound. It’s a new playing in the user submitted news community, but it also provides a platform for those that are frustrated about their lack of appearance on the front page of some of the major players. Now I can’t personally vouch for these individuals, I don’t know what their content is, but HYPick seems to be an open forum for a wide variety of possibilities in the news community. I look forward to seeing what this player can do!

Kevin Rose and His 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

Steven Finch — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:02:28 +0000

There is a post over at Techcrunch that seems to be getting a lot of hits today and I’m not entirely sure why! Kevin Rose the founder of Digg, Revision3 and Pownce, has written a guest post for Techcrunch which outlines the top 10 ways to increase your Twitter followers.

The 10 points that he makes seem be very basic and if you actually know how to use Twitter properly I’m sure they aren’t new to you. However what I find funny about this post is that Kevin has probably only really got his followers from mentioning Twitter on every Revision3 show that he does and by being hugely known in the USA as a tech boy pinup. It is just weird that he is trying to preach ways to increase your Twitter followers when he hasn’t really used any of these methods.

Digg Making Huge Changes and Maybe Finally Heading Towards Profit!

Steven Finch — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:19:13 +0000

Digg has finally made some critical changes to the way they are doing business. It has been reported by various sources this morning that Digg has fired about 10% of their staff and are hiring a direct sales team. I know this statement is probably bitter sweat for some of the employees fired, but Digg really needed to change the way they were doing business or eventually everyone there was going to be out of work.

This all comes on the back of BusinessWeek recently disclosing that Digg’s revenue was just $4.8 million in 2007, and through the first three quarters of 2008, $6.4 million. These results meant that they lost about $2.8 million 2007 and $4 million in 2008.

Digg are making these changes for one reason and that is to find a buyer! In my opinion Digg has to make a profit to have any chance of a acquisition. I think the team Digg have really taken the site as far as they can, because they had so many opportunities to implement Digg into a white label solution which would bring in million in license fees, but they were too busy trying for an acquisition based upon heavy loses. Is it just me or does this sound like a stupid business model. I know these days most tech startups don’t have a business model when they first start and they seem to be very reluctant to even add some advertising to at least generate some revenue. In this current climate that kind of business acument really doesn’t boad well for an acquisition!

Dataopedia: Look At Your Sites Key Metrics In One Place

Steven Finch — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:37:12 +0000

Not too long ago the guys over at Killerstartups launched a new service called Dataopedia. Dataopedia is a basic solution that allows users to type in any url and find quickly key metrics from various sources.

Metrics that are measured include Google PR, Alexa Numbers, Compete and Quantcast analysis, Social media breakdowns, Twitter news, Technorati links, Friendfeed and url registration information. Currently, Dataopedia pulls in all this information from various partners including Crunchbase, Compete, Digg, Getsatisfaction and more.

There’s also something interesting buried at the bottom of the site profiles: an ability to comment on the site using Disqus. While that’s not likely to have the reach of a Google Search Wiki, it provides yet another way to gather details about the site and its reputation.

Dataopedia does a great job of pulling all the key quantitative and qualitative site measures required in todays world of web 2.0. There is still a lot of improvements that can be made with the user interface, but over it is probably already leading in this specific market, even thought market is very small.

How To Make My Blog Stand Out From The Crowd?

Steven Finch — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:24:43 +0000

Yesterday I was having a great conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick (Vice President of Content Development at RWW, not sure what that means) about how to get your blog noticed in the current environment. The discussion started with me posing the basic question “how can I get my blog noticed because we seem to be producing very good content but not getting the rewards”?

It was first mentioned that Problogger is the best source for this information on the web, however I have been reading his site for many years now and most of the content seems to be getting a little reproduced. Additionally, Problogger talks a lot about social media and how to use it to your advantage, but these days everyone has been reading those articles for year and most bloggers use StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Buzz and other very proficiently. If most bloggers are using these tools to their advantage then you still have the same issues, how to stand out from the crowd?

I know that here in Europe a blog that has been on the rise lately is TheNextWeb, but I know these guys have been writing that blog for several years now and they also have one of the best technology conference on the mainland of Europe. Therefore if I want to improve my readership it is a little difficult to just start a conference, or is it worth adding some add-ons to the site such as job board, marketplace or others?

Content is also a major player in this issues, cause most good bloggers say that content is king. However, I think that content is king when you are either a small blog or a large blog, but definitely in the middle content isnt king and it is all about promotion and push.

This is main problem with web 2.0, noise! Currently, there is just simply so much noise in most niche’s, so why instead of writing individual sites and keeping a little revenue, maybe the plan should be to join forces with other blogs and create a larger blog and take a smaller slice of a much larger pie.

I propose this question to you, “how can I get my site to stand out from the rest, especially considering we produce amazing content that is much better than the majority of our competitors”?

Pownce-ing On The Opposition

matt — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:58:55 +0000

It was a week ago today, that Pownce lost it’s bounce. Co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone took their team with them to work with the company that acquired Pownce, Six Apart, on a new micro-blogging platform called Motion.

Pownce launched with wild-acclaim, supported by the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, it seemed to have all the necessary features to put it toe to toe with Twitter, photo and video sharing, status updates and a delightful interface. It just never really took off, despite being more stable than Twitter.

What does this mean for other micro-blogging sites?

Twitter, the biggest micro-blogging site thus far, recently shook off a $500 million offer from Facebook. And rightly so. As pointed out by Cnet’s Rafe Needleman, “…when it comes to business philosophies, the companies do not mesh. And I’m not just talking about the well-reported SMS expense that Facebook would take on if it integrated Twitter. More than that, Twitter’s stated revenue plans don’t work for Facebook.”

Twitter, one imagines, see themselves as fighting in the same field as Facebook, but on the other side of the fence. They are competitors, but not competitive.

The likes of Tumblr and YouAre are the main rivals to Twitter’s crown. How will these guys possibly stand up to fight with a company that can brush off a bid of half a billion dollars?

The key thing is to offer user friendly tools, such as sharing photos and videos, which Twitter just doesn’t do at the moment, unless you’re a fan of the tinyurl. Secondly it’s important to make it easy to sign up (box ticked) and to make it easy to encourage your friends to sign up and be a part of the action.

My problem with a lot of the newer micro-blogging services is that they’re falling into the trap of being too customisable. Look at Facebook’s wide ranging apps – how many are actually useful in our day to day lives and make a difference to the way we communicate? Very few. Similarly with Bebo and Myspace – the integration of new and exciting things to put on your page is exciting for a moment, but nothing more.

If Twitter is to be ousted, or at least equalled, competitors will need to find niches that they can cling on to and exploit. I see Tumblr as being a brilliant way to share photos for example – the message boxes are just large enough for a high definition image to be shown clearly, but not at a size that will set your PC into meltdown.

It is this specialisation that will see each service acquire a following and then grow as that group develops a culture unique to them. All these different cultures will eventually begin to intermingle as users being to find each service useful for different things and then telling their friends to join them on xyz.

It comes down to talent in the end however. Six Apart will have known all along that they were really just after the Pownce team, and not their name or platform. The biggest challenge facing all of the micro-blogging services will be to hold onto their key staff, thinkers and doers alike.

Social Networking, at the moment, is a philosophy that is becoming increasingly tangible, but not ingrained in mainstream culture as Facebook currently is, yet.

Facebook Connect Battles For Your Information

Luis Sandoval — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:43:34 +0000

In recent months the number of social networks has grown exponentially. At the beginning of this boom there were obvious leaders in the market, networks like MySpace and Facebook come to mind. In that time there have been a lot of networks looking for their place online, attracting niche groups from within the online community. Other networks were developed that had entirely different purposes, but still remained under the guise of a social media tool such as Twitter, Yelp, and Digg to name a few.

Everyone can see that at some point all this development will culminate a scenario where thousands of networks will be fighting for the dominant number of users, the smaller networks either dying out or being bought out. We saw this in a recent purchase of Pownce by SixApart, whose plans are to disable the service, but acquire the users via another service that will undoubtedly be under the sole development of SixApart. Users are given the option to transfer their data, but ultimately there is an example of services being absorbed by larger offerings due to the over abundance and saturation of the market.

Facebook Connect is now becoming the new battleground for social networks. The face of the war for users is changing, and MySpace and Facebook are battling for dominance. Luckily for users, we will ultimately benefit, and the winner is yet to be determined.

Facebook, In It to Win It

Facebook Connect was announced mid-summer with an expected launch of 24 partners on board. The concept was to create a portal by which users of Facebook could sign on and using their profiles, access data on other social networks, all without leaving the Facebook platform. By allowing users to port their profile data to third-party Web sites, several opportunities become available to the user.

You can leverage your identity across the web in trust environments for ease of use
Take your friends across various networks ensuring trusted social context anywhere you go
The piece of mind knowing that the privacy settings you set on Facebook will go with you as you cross the boundaries into other networks
Actions you make on partner sites will be shared with your friends on Facebook, keeping them in the know about what you like, what you’re doing, and what you find interesting

The idea of the project is to create a deeper, enriching experience using Facebook as the anchor for all your social media experiences.

What’s In It For Partner Sites?

The curious thing anyone would ask is why the networks would come together in such a way that their services rely on large sites like Facebook? For starters, the instinct to survive as to be at the top of the list. Networks are competing for users, all of them hoping to break out and be the leader in their respective niche. Secondly, by partnering you ensure that the millions of users that Facebook states they have will eventually bleed over onto the partnering network.

For example, by utilizing Facebook Connect a user and sign in and perhaps read about Digg. Wanting to be a part of the Digg community the user only has to select the partner and the profile data will port over to the Digg profile creation page instantly making it easier for the user to begin their Digg experience. The benefit is obvious ease of use, but also new users, and the power of link backs which gives the social sites their traction. By sharing contact lists, you increase the power of the network and Facebook benefits by being the hub for all of your social media access.

Currently MySpace is also fighting is also in the fight for your time, your identity and your data on the social networks, but Facebook has come out of the gate with very powerful alliances.

I’m curious to see the outcome of this online competition from two of the largest social community sites on the net today.

Digg, Why The Hell Can’t They Sell Their Company!

Steven Finch — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:50:50 +0000

Digg has to be one of the biggest web properties currently on the internet, with one of the most loyal communities. However, they seem to be able to grow the community, add on new features, turnover good revenue figures and get millions of pageviews, but they simply can’t sell their company to anyone!

Digg has been trying to sell for the last 6 months and yet no one is actually biting. They currently have a Microsoft as an investor and running their ad campaigns, plus they have been in talks with Google for an acquisition, but how come they cant finalise anything?

Is it because the $300 million price tag they are after, it just too out of reach? Is it because the big conglomerates aren’t too sure how they are going to fit the Digg technology into their search engines or portals? Is it because Digg has such a strong community base, any acquisition will just kill the site?

Im hoping to find out why the average person think Digg cant sell.

Let Gary V. Pick Your Tee

Luis Sandoval — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:51:30 +0000

In a surprising side venture, Gary Vaynerchuck known for his outrageous and popular Wine Library TV show, along with his brothers and Digg partner Joe Stump, have developed an amazing t-shirt search engine.

PleaseDressMe delves deep into the online world for hip and popular t-shirts from such places as Threadless and BustedTees. This venture is sure to gain in popularity, not just cause of the names attached to the project, but because of the popularity of slogan shirts.

The interface is no-nonsense, and while it’s still new, provides sufficient options for your search. Don’t know what you want? No problem, PleaseDressMe offers searches based on keywords, t-shirt colors, tags, and even price. A great way to encounter your own taste and at the same time be introduced to other shirts you did not know existed.

I would definitely keep an eye out on this site because it’s sure to explode with options in the coming months!

StumbleUpon Can Make You Famous

Luis Sandoval — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:44:58 +0000

There is famous and there is infamous, and StumbleUpon (SU) can make you both. In a recent event, Darren Rowse of Problogger got a first hand look at what SU did to make him infamous.

Darren has been a big supporter of SU, thus using it very heavily to rate sites across the net. In return for his dedicated support of others sites, a great number of his readership returns the support by stumbling his articles, creating a supportive community. Yesterday, he was notified that StumbleUpon had not just blocked, but banned him for abuse.

This misunderstanding hit the media networks in approximately an hour and a half the entire situation was resolved thanks to dedicated fans, but more importantly a customer friendly, transparent company willing to be open on the errors they make.

While many feel that SU was in the wrong, I find that measuring a business by how it admits and handles its errors is more important than assigning blame. SU did a fantastic and prompt job responding to Darren and Problogger was reestablished.

What is StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon, similar to Digg, allows you to vote for sites, increasing the popularity based on user support. Once a site has been stumbled, a chain reaction through the social network is viral, and many sites see an increase in traffic.

A toolbar installs into the browser header once downloaded. This allows them to “stumble” a site, a basic “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” If you “thumbs up” a site, you are allowed to provide a brief description of the site and your rating. If a site has already been stumbled then you’ve simply boosted the sites rating, which affects the frequency in the rotation of random sites that SU will display. StumbleUpon is heavily monitored for abuse to provide a level playing field for all sites involved.

I for one enjoy and fully support StumbleUpon, and encourage you to explore the application and while ranking sites is always enjoyable, clicking the “stumble” button can take you to sites you may never have found otherwise.

Photo Credit, tris

Digg Is About To Be Sold To Microsoft, So Why Cant Mixx Sort Themselves Out and Get In The Money?

Steven Finch — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:29:22 +0000

With Digg currently being rumoured to be in talks with Microsoft for an acquisition, I thought I would check out and see how the Digg competitors are fairing. One of Diggs’ main competitors is Mixx, now Mixx has been gaining a lot of traffic of late, but I still have a lot of problems with their site compared to Digg.

It seems like everytime I go to Mixx the site isnt function right. Today I headed there to promote a few of our articles, but I could barely launch the site and when I went to submit an article it wouldnt even load the page. So with all the growth, funding and syndication deals, how come Mixx still isnt up to scratch?

My Prediction Number 6, for 2008, Is Coming True

Steven Finch — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 13:29:03 +0000

I just thought I would let everyone know about my number 6. from my 2008 predictions. “Digg will be sold but I think for only about $200 million and not the $300 million they are looking for”.

Well know the Digg CEO Jay Adelson states, “Sorry to burst any drama theories, but they arenâ€™t true. We remain focused on improving Digg and rolling out great features.”

There have been a lot of rumours lately that havent come to fruition, but as Mike Arrington mentioned over at Techcrunch, I think we should sit back and ’see how this one plays out’. I think Digg will definitely be sold this year, it is only a matter of time!

Digg Will Find A Buyer Very Soon: Microsoft, Google or another?

Steven Finch — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:25:41 +0000

This has to be the biggest news since the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. Digg is still up for sale and Techcrunch reports that they are close to finding a buyer. If you dont already know, investment bank Allen & Co have been shopping around on Digg’s behalf to find a potential buyer. A source very close to the deal mentions that four companies are in heavy due diligence with Digg – two media/news companies, and two big Internet companies – Google and Microsoft. And Google and Microsoft are on the verge of making their bids.

Originally, Digg was looking for a price tag of around $300 million, but it is reported that Google are likely to bid approximately $200 million for Digg. Microsoft however will be offering a figure lower that the $200 million, solely because they already have a three year advertising deal with Digg.

Even at $200 million is Digg overpriced? I think it is. Digg has received a lot of rewards for their technology and product, but the community is the key. If Digg is bought by Microsoft will the community continue to use the product with the same intensity as they current do? I think not.

So far Digg has only raised $11.3 million in funding, so this will be a great out for Kevin Rose and friends.

Mixx Takes $2 Million In Series B Funding

Steven Finch — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:03:17 +0000

Mixx has just announced that they have taken $2 million in Series B funding from InterSouth Partners. Mixx is a user generated content system, similar to Digg, Reddit and Propeller. Total funding to date is $3.5 million, in which they have high profile investors on board, such as the LA Times.

IAC Partners With Digg For New White Label Service

Steven Finch — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:30:02 +0000

It has been reported by Valleywag in December and now again by Silicon Alley, that Digg are working on a white label version of their product for the IAC. “I’ve seen it, and it looks great,” silicon alley correspondent writes. We inquired with Ask, and got a “no comment at this time”, but we got something slightly more encouraging from Digg’s Jay Adelson: “We have no comment on our relationship with Ask, but will keep you updated!”

If I had a pound for every time I hear “Digg Killer”, then I would def. be rich and owning my own island in the caribbean. However, since the sort of failure of Netscape (now Propeller), there has really been no service to challenge Digg. Now this white label will be on the scene, i dont think it will be a Digg killer mainly because it is getting written by Digg. Thus, how can it really challenge, or are IAC just trying to gain some extra pageviews and fill out their portfolio before they spin off Ask.com into an IPO?? Only time will tell, but im looking forward to seeing this new service soon.

Diggnation at FOWA Conference

Steven Finch — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:51:21 +0000

Diggnation live from the FOWA Conference in London. Enjoy!

Digg Casemod Up For Sale!

Steven Finch — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:48:27 +0000

Holy cow. The extreme modders at Computer Choppers are selling their behemoth of a casemod – the Digg case. For those of you who havenâ€™t been keeping tabs on the modding comunity of late, you probably wonâ€™t know all the details – but Iâ€™ve gone to the liberty of posting â€˜em up here for all too see. More photos after the jump.

The Digg case mod is a one-off project by Computer-Choppers.com finished in April 2007. It was modeled from the Digg.com logo (popular social news website) and has been used as a show-computer piece for most of the summer at various computer events in the northwest. It has just about 30 hours of use on it in total. The system will be featured in a future issue of CPU magazine later this year or the start of 2008. The case is fabricated from the ground up using MDF (fiberboard) and has been finished with a blue pearl custom paint job. The letters on the front of the case light up in blue and can be switched off and on at any time. A newsreader under the lettering takes the top news stories from Digg.com and displays them on the front of the case.

Bidding currently stands at only $2,500! For the Intel Core 2 Extreme processor inside, youâ€™d expect to pay more than this for even just a basic rig, let alone a super-modded component-packed master model like this. Iâ€™d place a bid, but a rather daunting several thousand dollar shipping bill to the UK doesnâ€™t sound all that appetising.

Via: Techzi

The Internets Biggest Google Whores

Steven Finch — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 21:08:56 +0000

At the end of September last year John Chow released his a list of the Top Google Whores, and this post is going to try to update this list. Any readers who might know of anyone who should be on the list make sure you let me know. Additionally, if you are on the list and need the amount update, please let me know.

Markus Frind: PlentofFish.com – $300,000 per month. Plentyoffish.com receives up to 500 million page views per month and make over $10,000 per day for Markus, who runs the site from home.
Kevin Rose: Digg - $250,000 per month. Do I really need to give Kevin Rose an introduction. Kevin Rose started Digg in December of 2004 with just $1000. Today Digg is one of the biggest news sites on the Net, with over 400,000 members and over 200 million page views per month.
Jeremy Schoemake: ShoeMoney - $140,000 per month. If ever anyone can be considered an Internet marketing superstar, ShoeMoney would be near the top of the list. Jeremy Schoemaker is a search engine marketer who knows how to take advantage of both Google AdSense and AdWords.
Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc. – $120,000 per month. Before Jason Calacanis sold Weblogs to AOL for $25 million, he got the network of blogs making over $4,000 a day from Google Adsense.
David Miles Jr & Kato Leonard: Freeweblayouts.net – $100,000 per month. This was claimed by the Washington Post in an article. Freeweblayouts.net gives away designs that people can use on their Myspace page.
Tim Carter: AskTheBuilder.com – $30,000 per month. Tim Carter is a licensed master plumber and carpenter with his own radio show. He also makes frequent television appearances. He founded AsktheBuilder.com in 1995, The primary focus has been catering to an avid following of fellow builders on the site.
Andrew Leyden: PodcastDirectory.com - $30,000 per month. Andrew receives nearly a million hits a month on his podcast directory.
Shawn Hogan: DigitalPoint.com – $15,000 per month. According to the New York Times back in January 2005 Mr Hogan makes $15,000 per month from Google Adsense by using a very unique revenue sharing model.
Max Goldberg: YTMND.com – $10,000 per month.
Steve Pavlina: StevePavlina.com – $10,000 per month.
Matt Daimler: Seatguru.com – $10,000 per month. Matther Daimler, 28, developed an obsession with finding the most comfortable seats on the long airline flights he took for business.

Digg Announces Facelift

Steven Finch — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:55:57 +0000

Digg’s Kevin Rose has announced plans for a Digg facelift this week.

The change comes in the form of a home page that can be viewed in three forms: just news, just videos, and both at once.

The new home page will “pave the way” for Digg to start cataloging images, which will be rolled out around October.

Digg also plans to overhaul the comments section so it’s “easier and more lightweight.”