Digg

Pingdom has released a new report about traffic trends across a variety of social news sites. The sites included in the report are: Digg, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Newsvine, Fark, Dzone and Sphinn.

What the report shows is that while so many sites focus only on Digg, there are other players that are still worth working.

Here are the findings:

• Traffic-wise, Digg.com stands heads and shoulders above the other sites in this survey, but they seem to have reached a plateau. They have roughly the same number of visitors now compared to a year ago.
• Mixx.com has the most aggressive growth curve. Propeller.com (previously hosted on the Netscape.com domain) is also growing fast, doubling its traffic in the last year.
• Slashdot.org (the original) is losing visitors. They have roughly 25% less visitors now compared to a year ago.
• The five largest based on website visitors (sorted, largest first): Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Slashdot.org, Propeller.com and Fark.com. (Reddit.com is in 6th place, and is about to overtake Fark.)

The report uses Google Trends for the raw numbers. It's clear the Digg traffic needle is stuck in neutral. Also, whatever happened to Newsvine? The service were acquired by MSNBC last October and haven't been in the news since.

Editor's note: Dan Zarrella has put together a viral content sharing report and below is a small part of the report focusing on content types and online content sharing.

When most people think of viral content, one of the first things they think of is humor, silly Youtube videos, hilarious cartoons and toungue-in-cheek articles, but as I discovered with my viral content sharing report, the most savvy and prolific viral sharers prefer spreading news more than humor.

When I looked at the profile segments I constructed out of the survey data, I noticed a pattern among those respondents who frequently used new and geeky social web technologies, like Twitter and Digg: they prefer sharing funny content less than their less-social-media-savvy counterparts. The same pattern appears for frequent users of less bleeding-edge technologies (like blogs and Facebook), but it is far less accute.

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Over the past couple of weeks, I am noticing a trend on Digg even more than normal. Mainstream newspaper sites are making it to the frontpage more than ever before. The Engadget, Ars Technica and Gizmodo trifecta haven't owned the frontpage as they did previously. The Guardian newspaper Web site (and a few other UK daily papers) are regularly making it to the frontpage more than once a day. In fact, as I write this, the Guardian has 2 stories on the first page of the frontpage currently. I've written before that Digg has been trying to move away from the tech sector to attempt to grow past the fanboy set that attends their diggnation shows.

Could this lead to discussion about potential buyers for the news aggregator? I have no source for the following comment, it's my view and speculation. Would the Guardian Media Group be a good home for Digg? Many blogs have discussed Google, CurrentTV, Yahoo, Microsoft and Fox as buyers. I haven't seen anyone look across the pond for suitors. The Guardian acquired PaidContent last week for $30 million and is looking to grow their Internet presence. Could all of these frontpage stories be a test?

SAI says Digg is worth $125 million, I think it's worth less. Last year Digg hired a bank to help find a buyer. Could Digg be the next acquisition for the Guardian? It would be a smart CPM ad play on both sides. Our research says 52% of Digg'ers block ads.

On a side note, I am also noticing that stories can now sit in upcoming for more than the previous 24-hour time period. And the trifecta blogs are well represented in the top tier of upcoming. My Apple battery story has 120 well diversified Diggs but didn't make the frontpage. Is the upcoming section the new home for blogs?

Earlier this week Digg held a concert live Diggnation taping in NYC. When Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback took to the stage, he asked that the crowd make some noise for sponsor Microsoft and Zune. The crowd instantly began to boo louder and louder. Louderback then asked if the crowd wanted some t-shirts which required that they didn't boo for the Zune but instead cheered it. The crowd took the shirts and then began to boo again.

Later on in the evening when Kevin Rose and sidekick came out to begin the Diggnation show, Kevin also attempted to get the crowd excited about the Zune. Again the crowd boo'ed over and over. Kevin said he had three Zune devices to give away and that if the crowd didn't get excited about the Zune, they wouldn't give away the Zunes. The crowd seemed to mellow down after that.

As I stood there and watched the sheep, I started to wonder why Digg would take money from Microsoft when their most loyal users clearly don't care about the Zune or Microsoft. I've seen similar behavior on tech blogs that accept ads that are far beyond what would be considered "in scope." continue reading »

Tonight in the middle of nowhere Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Digg held a party and a live Diggnation taping. I've embeded some of my photos below. I got to meet Jeff Jarvis and his son Jake along with seeing Sarah Meyers Austin, the Viddler boys, AJ Vaynerchuk. AJ has accepted an intern position with Revision3 and will be moving out to San Francisco next week and will sleep on couches for the entire two months. I hear he is going to attempt to create a show bigger than his brother, Gary Vee's wine show.

While waiting outside, I spoke with a man from Sirius satellite radio. He said that he was there to meet with the Revision3 team on a potential partnership to, "bring Revision3 shows to Sirius."

The scene was mad, apparently over 1,000 people showed up for the event. The overall crowd was about 80% young men and about 20% young women. Honestly, it was a bit weird to see Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback jumping up and down like a lunatic on stage when just a week ago he spoke at the MediaBistro Circus.

Brian Brushwood from Scam School opened the event by sticking pins and needles in various parts of his body. To be honest, the stuff was freaky. Apparently tomorrow at some point in the evening he is going to attempt to scam iTunes into giving him the #1 ranking in the podcasts category. The event will be coordinated on Twitter, so follow him if you want in.

view the photos »

The super big news this afternoon is that MySpace has joined the DataPortability movement in a big way. Here's all you need to know about this announcement:

1. some of the data (photos, videos, text) stored on MySpace will be available to their friend networks which include: Yahoo!, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket.

2. it's not really data portability, more like data sharing

3. it's live data sharing -- if you change your status from male to female, it's instantly zapped to all of the places you've shared the info. This is awesome because it makes it easier than having to remember to change it in a million social networks.

4. They will accept Facebook into their data sharing plan but Zucks gotta be the one to make the call.

SAI has notes from the live conference call and Venture Beat has detailed analysis of the announcement. Check out all of our DataPortability coverage.

Chris Saad, data portability leader sent over the following video that explains the companies that have signed up to push info in and those who have signed up to suck info out.

Video hosting service Viddler is announcing they have reached terms on an agreement to carry all of the Revision3 shows on Viddler's network. I am not exactly sure which side of the table this benefits more but I am guessing it's Viddler. If you are a fan of any of the Revision3 shows: GigaOm Show, Tekzilla, Kevin and Pal sit on a couch and drink beer for money or PixelPerfect, once you friend the show on Viddler, you will be instantly updated once new shows are available.

Viddler technical evangelist Colin Devroe has all of the details on the distribution partnership.

In all seriousness, this is an exciting deal for Viddler. It's good to see them continue to sign on partners and with their existing base of Web celebs, they on a great road towards mainstream adoption. Will Viddler be the one to challenge YouTube eventually as a video host? Viddler seems to be the only video host to be working on innovations and technology advancements. The Viddler player kicks the arse of all other video players.

Now we know why Kevin Rose was at the Viddler dinner at SXSW. He sat at the grownups table with Rob from Viddler and Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback.

Social news aggregator Digg has announced several enhancements to their DataPortability support. Digg's Steve Williams provides an overview of the updates which include:

-- XFN Friends Network access - this lets other services tie-into your friends on Digg

-- hCard access - this is basically your business card - allows other machines to read your Digg profile for the juicy bits of personal info

-- They've also added RDFa, which Wikipedia explains "allows you to annotate XHTML markup with semantics."

These steps are a good move forward for DataPortability. It's not exactly how I'd define DP but it's a good step for Digg to make.

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This weekend's bitchfest is about the "conversation" and where it takes place. We've got Louis Gray for the "Steal Me" team and Tony Hung for the "Don't Steal Me" team. Then there's Robert Scoble who should probably stick to running the camera for interviews. Canadian blogger Mark Evans wonders if pageviews still matter. That answer is easy: yes.

I went for a walk in Times Square and started to think about this question again. It seems to come up about once a month with some tool or app, this time it's with Shyftr. We discussed it with Brijit. Last month I wrote, "There. Everywhere. But Here." Lastly in January 2007, we asked why Digg allows comments.

Here's where we stand -- everyone has already stolen the conversation. Here are some examples:

• Digg
• Reddit
• Delicious
• Sphinn
• Mixx
• Shyftr - they also steal the actual content
• Propeller
• News.YCombinator
• FriendFeed

Stolen conversations are where a service allows users to comment on content created elsewhere. On virtually none of the sites above, can you actually create content. You are sharing content that you think others in the particular community might enjoy. In my post about Digg allowing comments, I asked Digg to create a way for the comments to show on my post here along with on Digg. Otherwise what happens is that a post looks like crap because there is no conversation yet there might be hundreds of comments elsewhere. I continue to stand firm that none of these community sites need to allow comments - they should be pushing the commenting activity back to the original source. But without comments Digg would have 20% of the traffic they do today, the money is in the comments.

I'd like to see the conversation come back to the source because this allows everyone to join in one large conversation. If we can allow comments anywhere, and they can be aggregated back to the source, that would be a decent workaround. Make no mistake about it, in a perfect world, a reader would enter their comments on the source only so the source can benefit from the work created instead of from all the thieves. A user could read the comments from any of the services.

It's interesting that not one of the other posts has discussed the monetary (cash or brand building) side of commenting. Both for the original source along with the conversation thieves.

Early this morning, TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington posted a rumor that Google and Microsoft are in a bidding war for social news aggregator Digg. We wrote about it and linked to the story on TC. This afternoon, word out of Digg HQ is that the story is, "completely inaccurate". Digg CEO Jay Adelson goes on to say, "Sorry to burst any drama theories, but they aren’t true. We remain focused on improving Digg and rolling out great features."

Arrington has updated his post with the following comment, "Lets see how this plays out." The story on TC has received over 5200+ diggs as of this post and will generate thousands of new inbound links.

TC receives a lot of rumors and while many of them come to fruition, it appears lately the ratio has been slowly lowering - Kara Swisher has been going pretty hard at TC on their rumors as of late. As Arrington says, let's see how this one plays out.