Digg Archive

Earlier today, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed that today is “Digg Day”. Apparently what this means is that it is now a law that each resident of San Francisco digg at least one story today. Failure to do so will result in loss of 20 Twitter followers.

Our team of investigative journalists in the bay area have been running around town investigating this story and found the following results of the investigation. Beginning on January 1, 2010, San Francisco will no longer use the Gregorian calendar.  That’s the one that we learn as little kids the rhyme, ”30 days has november, april, june and september”. Going forward San Francisco will use the “Startups Calendar”. This might sound new to some of you and I can confirm after speaking with the people at Gregorian that it is indeed new. They are worried that there might be issues with the new calendar but I explained that San Francisco is always ahead of the curve and is always innovating!

Some of the dates in 2010 have already been booked. For example, our investigation revealed that Facebook has January 10th, Google is bidding on two dates using Google CalendarWords and Twitter has the month of August.  Twitter got the full month after adding the Mayor to the suggested user list.

After speaking with the city “calendaring task force for calendars”, we have learned that from December 15-21, there will be an open nomination process for other dates.

The nomination process is simple. Startup founders may nominate their startup for a day. The startup must have less than $72.13 billion in revenue (this is per the nomination rules for that startup awards thing), at least 300 Twitter followers and 152.1 Facebook Friends. We also learned that if the startup is using MySpace, they are disqualified. Now you might  be wondering what happens if say Seesmic and Kyte pick the same day. That’s simple – article 12, paragraph 1 states that the startup with the most Twitter followers receive the date.

If you would like to nominate your startup or find out more about the rules, go here for complete details.

A new NY-based startup named NYC.is is hoping to create, “a new kind of front page”. The idea is simple…users submit NYC-related stories and then other users vote on each story. The best ones appear on the frontpage of NYC.is.  The site was developed by a Columbia grad student.

What I’ve noticed after living here is that nearly every community in the five boroughs has multiple websites discussing the local scene from food to transit to parties. NYC.is could be a good place to aggregate all of that information together and help local news and events get more visibility.

As with any voting site, I must note that the voting mechanism is Digg-like. Not the Digg of late, but the earlier Digg.

NYC.is accepts links via a web submission form but should also look at accepting links via facebook and twitter. They are currently indexing over 100 sites including The Feedbag, Joey in Astoria and Sheepshead Bites.

NYC.is appears to be using Drupal as their CMS platform. While there are currently no ads on the site, they are working with Technorati Media for ad sales and management.

Swiss-based Sobees has announced updates to their two client applications: bDule and Sobees. Founder Francois Bochatay explains the difference between the two application by noting that bDule is their starter kit providing a Windows-based client combining Twitter and Facebook support. Sobees is a multi-window application that combines many “bDules” together.

Most of the updates in today’s 0.9.6.5 release are usability and performance enhancements. They have also rewritten the Flickr search. The new functionality is the addition of Digg and the Digg search along with the ability to submit items from others windows to Digg. They have also added new themed content windows for the MLB, soccer, tennis and the NFL.

The Sobees tools compete in the same space as Tweetdeck and the new Seesmic. Currently the Sobees tools are only available for Windows. The company is working on a cross-platform version which they expect to release this summer.

One of the first posts here on CN was a recap of a presentation at the Future of Web Apps conference with Kevin Rose. In that presentation (and many since), Kevin noted that the site was built with, “$2,000 to start, using a developer on elance for $10/hr.”

Found via Andrew Badera, below is an interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy and Owen Byrne. Owen was the technical builder of the first version of Digg. In the interview, Owen speaks about what really took place as Digg was built. Andrew talks about the “celebrity” status that Kevin Rose has received for creating Digg. Some notes:

• Apparently Kevin was nervous that he might be losing his job and needed to find something else to move to
• The supposed $10/hr on Elance is not correct Owen says – it was more and he also received equity in the company
• Digg mainly came about because Kevin wanted to get to the frontpage of Slashdot and couldn’t
• Kevin had a lot of friends who blogged about Digg and the notes on the Screensavers show helped build massive inbound links
• Owen says luck and timing played a big part of the Digg success
• Interesting line from Owen regarding luck… “luck is just probability and the more times you try, the higher your probability”
• Apparently Paris Hilton losing her cell phone was a huge help with Digg growth in the early days
• Interesting discussion from Owen’s perspective about the human side of Digg’s growth

Check out the full video interview below and the associated notes on Mixergy. Andrew pushes Owen to give tips about entrepreneurship. You can just listen to this video while you are working – it’s a must listen/watch.
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Earlier today Digg announced the launch of their new "DiggBar". Basically the new version of a toolbar from the early 90s, the idea is to provide an easy way to see if someone has submitted the story to Digg along with related stats and stories from other publishers via Digg. Lots of other tech journalists covered the story including Michael Arrington, Frederic Lardinois and MG Siegler. I hadn’t planned on covering this story but after reviewing the code behind the toolbar, there are some very important points that these journalists seem to have missed that I thought were worth sharing.

Tracking

From checking the code, Digg is running (at least) two sets of analytics within the toolbar. One appears to come from Microsoft and the other comes from Quantcast. The Quantcast code is identical to the main site – just how will that play into Digg’s monthly numbers on Quantcast? It sure looks like each DiggBar load will also increment the counter for Quantcast 1-for-1. Should they be credited on a toolbar load as if it was a full page load? Of course not – I have an email into Quantcast to verify how these toolbars will be counted. Toolbar and widget counts and analytics are the most difficult today because of the way they load and are handled – this was a part of my discussion with ShareThis last week.

Ad Serving

As MG noted, there are ads inside of the toolbar… how do those ads load? While they only "appear" when a tab is selected, are they actually loaded upon initial DiggBar load? I will need to confirm but it does appear that the ads are all loaded into the page when the DiggBar is loaded. It’s a pretty damn interesting question – not just for Digg but for any site that hides ads on pageloads.

Double Pageviews

Since Digg has changed their entire site to use this new DiggBar, sites that hit the Digg frontpage may benefit from massive double pageviews. Why? For users who click the big X to eliminate the toolbar, Digg is then forced to reload the exact same webpage again. Should advertisers be paying for this double pageview? If I was an advertiser on x or y site, this would certainly be something for me to consider. Of course the favorite Digg sites will love the bonus pageviews. I think there were some actions around this double pageview ad behavior in the mid-90s.

Also, Digg gets a double pageview when stories are clicked from Digg.com. You view a story on Digg and click a link (say Ars Technica). Digg loads up the bar with full goodness and grabs a second pageview from the bar load. Interesting…

Page Load Times

The DiggBar is nearly 100k in size – what does that do to page load times, especially when browsing from a mobile?

I will leave the topic of URL stealers (similar to conversation stealers) for another post as the issue is wider than just the DiggBar.

I would be careful to put DiggBar in the same category as other URL shorteners like MooURL, TinyURL or even Bitly. This is much more of a Digg play than an actual URL shortener.

Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider has an investigative post today where he analyzed the advertising that is running on Digg. At the end of his investigation, he noted that Digg is clearly running targeted ads now because he viewed ads that matched three of Digg’s categories. He concluded the investigation by calling the change a, "christmas miracle".

Clickety Clack disagreed with the Carlson investigation, noting that the ads were just run of network ads. I decided to take a look into whether the ads were now, in fact, being targeted. Assuming they are, it would certainly be a good step for Digg because frankly I wonder sometimes who is in charge of their business plan. In our test back in March, 52% of Digg’ers blocked ads when visiting CN through a link on the Digg frontpage. Ads alone will never be enough to keep Digg afloat.

What did I find? To test, I used three computers, two logged into Digg, one anonymous on three different Internet connections. Below are a few of the screenshots I grabbed from the pages that Carlson notes are now targeted. As you can see, the ads in my testing are not targeted. Looking at the source code, it also doesn’t appear that there is anything but the typical run-of-network ads running on Digg. At this point, without any confirmation from Digg, I can only infer that Carlson was just lucky in his page load timing in viewing targeted ads on category pages.

A year ago I reviewed the first episode of NBC tech drama Chuck. Overall the writers have done an excellent job in bringing in geek technology without making it appear fake. From dropping a wikipedia here and a router there, it’s a fun little show.

However in this week’s episode, a comment was made by Chuck’s sidekick Morgan that clearly had me wondering. I’ve embedded the clip below (30 seconds). Morgan (and clearly NBC as the creator of the show) didn’t get the memo from Diggnation founder Kevin Rose. You see Diggnation is sponsored by the Zune, the Microsoft music player. If Kevin and Revision3 are taking the $$ from Microsoft for the Zune, you know that it is a damn fine quality product and should not be joked with. Let’s hope that next week Chuck will check the current lineup of sponsors for Diggnation and properly handle them if the need arises inside of the episode.