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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The funding comes from existing venture backers Greylock Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and the Omidyar Network and was led by new investor Highland Capital Partners. It certainly seems like a lot of money - perhaps they are hunkering down for the potentially bad financial times.

Digg has seen many rumors floating around with regards to acquisitions over the past 18 months including Google and Microsoft.

Our inside source tells us that part of the funding will be to dedicate an employee to pushing Ars Technica stories to the frontpage. 

Brad Stone at the NY Times additionally notes, "Digg will also use the cash to develop analytic tools for its publishing partners who use Digg buttons on their sites (such as the New York Times), so that those publishers can see what kinds of stories resonate with Digg users. The company will also move to larger headquarters in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco."

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.

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.

Not only did I observe this preference when the respondents were sharing content individually with their friends, but also when they’re sharing in one-to-many ways (broadcast sharing, like submitting to Digg, Tweeting or blogging):

One possible reason for this may be that savvy social media users have become desensitized to all the "funny" attempts at viral content and have much higher funny-enough-to-share thresholds.

When I looked at those users who shared content more frequently or with more people than the average respondent I noticed the same trend:

Even if your ultimate target market is not early-adopter geeks, as a viral marketer it still pays off to focus on the types of content these highly prolific users prefer to share, as they’re the ones who are more likely to spread your content and when they do they can spread it much further. When you’re developing your next piece of hopefully-viral content, keep this in mind and instead of reaching for the trusty humor hook, try something timely or useful (like a how-to).

This is a small part of the large data presented in the full report I did on the results of my survey, if you want to know more, be sure to read the rest of my viral content sharing report.

Dan Zarrella is a social and viral marketing scientist, check out his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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?

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."

Does Digg have a responsibility to work with advertisers that match what their loyal users are looking for? I am guessing that Microsoft wants to hit the 16-29 male demographic and when Revision3/Digg pitches their campaigns, that’s how they do it. "Hey Microsoft, we have users that are in the demographic you are trying to hit with the Zune, c’mon sign up today!" Do they explain to Microsoft that clearly the overwhelming majority of Digg users don’t give a crap about the Zune and wouldn’t buy one if a gun was pointed to their head?

I do understand that Digg may not have been aware that Microsoft and the Zune are "hated" within the Digg community of users but now that they know, do they have a responsibility to no longer accept ads from the group?

Should publishers (video, audio, text, etc.) take money from advertisers when they know that the campaigns won’t benefit the advertiser? Or is it the advertiser’s responsibility to do the homework on which publishers will work best? Do publishers have a responsibility to clearly explain to advertisers that x or y program might not be well suited for the publisher?

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.

Here are my photos…

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.

Here’s my favorite question/answer from the conference call:

Q: Will this be available to world MySpace users?
A: On a global basis. Starting on a worldwide basis.

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.

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.

– 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.