Digg.com has a wide arrangement of images that people submit to the site on a daily basis. This video on YouTube shows off a compilation of the funniest images highlighted on Digg. Some classics in this bunch for sure!
The Digg Story Doesn’t Sell Anymore
January 22, 2008 By 6 Comments
Muhammad Saleem posted an article on Techcrunch.com that goes over 9 different reasons on why the Digg story sells. Muhammad makes a series of points that I agree helped to propel Digg.com to success. However, the golden days of Digg.com are long gone.
One of the biggest reasons why Digg became successful was that it provided individuals with the opportunity to govern the site. By way of democracy, users choose which articles were submitted to the site, what made it to the front page, which new features should be implemented, ect. What a novel concept this was in the beginning. Fast forward to today and what do we have?
Digg is now controlled by the majority of users who just so happen to be Apple fanboys, who just happen to be Linux fanboys, who just happen to be political nut cases. Occasionally, you will see an article reach the front page that doesn’t fit in these three categories, but for the most part, these three categories run the roost. At one time, it was ok to submit Digg articles that were housed on blogs. Nope, you can’t do that anymore because the majority of Digg users frown on blogs and consider all blogs to be internet trash.
Digg used to be an awesome place where you could browse the front pages and check out some of the coolest things on the web that you normally wouldn’t of found on your own. In recent months, it would appear as though the majority of your front page articles on Digg.com come from reputable, major news publication websites. What a drag.
Don’t mention the commenting that takes place on these Digg articles. Every conversation on Digg.com turns into another pile of crap. However, I will admit that I usually read the comments before I actually visit the article that was dug and this may be the reason why my IQ has been getting lower.
Digg became a success because it was one of the first sites of it’s kind that provided users with the decision making capabilities. It was also built from the ground up from a guy that was on TechTV who generated quite the following. Of course, you either love Kevin Rose or you hate the guy. Truth be told, thousands of folks jumped on the Digg bandwagon simply because Kevin Rose was behind the idea. (Pownce is another classic example). It’s also a success because of the amazing amount of traffic that one could receive if you just so happen to publish an article that was graced by the hands of the Digg gods. (Top Diggers). Every blogger along with mainstream media embedded digg buttons, hoping anyone out their who thought the content was worth a damn would digg it. Think about all of the DIGG THIS buttons that are across the net. What an amazing advertising campaign that turned out to be, and Digg didn’t have to spend a dime.
With all that being said, many of the things that made Digg successful are also the things that are dragging the service down. Digg is run by crowds of vocal people. So vocal in fact, that if you put the words Microsoft Sucks or Apple or Linux into your post title, you’re guaranteed a front page spot on Digg. It doesn’t matter if the story is nothing more than a rumor. Because of these insanely vocal crowds, regular users visit Digg.com and are constantly bombarded with these types of news stories.
The bottom line is this. Digg WAS great, now it SUCKS. Do yourself a favor and create an RSS feed that aggregates stories submitted to Digg with the keywords you configure so you rarely have to visit the Digg.com site itself. Let the (lack of wisdom) Digg crowd work for you, not against you. Thats the motto of Kevin Rose and so far, it’s proven to be a good business model.
Digg Labs ScreenSaver
October 16, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Digg has turned their popular Digg Labs applications into desktop screensavers. The applications can be downloaded from their respective pages:
The screensavers are available for Mac and Windows users and include Adobe Flash 9 if you don’t have it installed. On the Mac you’ll need at least OSX 10.4 and on Windows you need either Windows XP or Vista. I personally enjoy watching the STACK as it looks like it’s raining Diggs.
DIGG THIS PLEASE I’m Begging You
October 16, 2007 By 8 Comments
Over the last month or so, I have noticed a sharp increase in what has become known as DIGG BEGGING. These are people who post their links on Twitter, forums and wherever else asking sometimes begging people to Digg their article. The question I ask is, WHY? I understand the importance of the Digg front page which sends a torrent of traffic your way if your lucky but why resort to begging or using Digg exchanges? For us common users, Digg used to be a place which was ruled my the majority, also known as the wisdom of crowds. It seems as if the Digg system has finally broke down to the point where there is more trash within the Digg system than there are nuggets of gold.
If your page or content is front page worthiness, I’m sure it would reach the front page without the need of begging or purchasing Diggs. As DigitalSpammer suggests, please make this stop.
The Truth Behind The Digg Effect
September 25, 2007 By 9 Comments
Chris Brogan, a social media maven, has published an article on his blog that goes into detail about his experience with the so called “Digg Effect“. Chris provides a visualization which shows the surge in traffic he received when he reached the Digg front page. What happened as a result? According to Chris, NOTHING. His RSS subscriber base didn’t increase, nor did the initial traffic to his site which is the basis for this post. Bloggers and site owners alike believe that getting on the front page of Digg is like striking gold, unfortunately this is not the case.
I’m not saying that being on the front page of Digg is a bad thing, but there is something you have to realize. The type of traffic that Digg sends is the “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” type of traffic. And while were talking about this sort of traffic, the same thing can be said for Stumbleupon, Sphinn, and Propeller. I’ve read so many blog entries that covered their own surge of traffic and the similarities between all of them are the same. No one sticks around, no one subscribes to the RSS feed, and the site that was once popular ends up returning to the shadows of the web.
A blogger or site owner should be looking to grow their reader base and that won’t happen by getting on the front page of Digg or any other major social bookmarking site. There is the argument where if you appear on these sites multiple times, there is a more likely chance of gaining quality traffic. I wouldn’t consider the digg effect to be called quality traffic, but I do think that by receiving this fly by night traffic, your building brand awareness. Your brand being your site and it’s a golden rule that REPITITIVENESS works.
The gist of what I am trying to say is to not rely on Digg, Stumbleupon or any other website to provide you with traffic. Instead, write good quality content. Good quality content does the job of so many other facets of blogging. Good quality content creates links, conversations, interactivity, spawns relationships, builds your brand and does so many other positive things for you, that if I were to write a book on SEO, it would contain one page. That one page would simply say, WRITE QUALITY CONTENT.
Tell me what you think in regards to this issue. I’d be very interested in your opinion.
BTW. Hello to all of you STUMBLING across this post. Are you here to prove me wrong?
FireFox Has Its Own Sports Car
September 19, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Check out this decked out sports car which is littered with all sorts of FireFox references. This thing has a very slick paint job. How many chicks do you think you’d be able to pick up with this baby?
Click on the image to see a larger version. Taken by nobihaya
On a side note, I was reading the comments on Digg and I finally read a comment which had me laughing my ass off.
by oneoverzero 4 hours ago The IE car must have crashed.
Why Reddit And Digg Are Crap
September 18, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Gamma4Xray has put together a video which provides visuals explaining how we think web 2.0 works vs how web 2.0 actually works in regards to sites such as Reddit and Digg. The video does include some nice theatrical music to go along with the graphics and at the very end, Gamma asks the question, How Can We Make Web 2.0 Give Us What We Want? I was surprised that an answer to that question wasn’t given as it’s an easy answer. The answer is RSS. At any rate, watch the video and let me know what you think.
Pownce Update Provides New Features
September 4, 2007 By 1 Comment
Kevin Rose startup, Pownce, has completed the roll out of a new update which contains a couple of new features such as on site image and video previews, other profile links and more user customization options.
Users can now view images and videos that are within links, on site. You’ll no longer need to actually click the link in order to preview what it is. As it stands, you can now embed video into your Pownce messages as long as it is from one of these services, YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Revver and Vimeo. On site image previews are currently only capable of being viewed from Zooomr but Pownce plans on adding Photobucket and Flickr support in a future update.
Pownce has added a feature that I think many users are going to appreciate. Powncers will now be able to display links to their other online profiles. The list of sites to choose from which you have an account with is tiny compared to that of OnXiAm, but the list does contain quite a few popular services which should suffice for now.
Also released in this update, is an area on your Pownce user page that displays the next 5 Upcoming Events. In the top right-hand corner of your Pownce user page, you will now see a list containing the next 5 events that you created, or that you have been invited to.
Last but not least, Pownce has included a few more user customization options. These are described below:
you can now open links in a new window by default! you can also set your default note view to something other than ‘notes & replies’, and you can select whom you’re note. tired of seeing all replies displayed inline? no worries, you can set it to just ‘notes’. and finally, you can specify whom notes should go to by default (such as your ‘best friends’ or ‘coworkers’ set).
If you use Pownce, be sure to check out the new features and let me know what you think. If you want, you can add me as a friend as well http://pownce.com/Jeffro2pt0/ I don’t use Pownce that much as I get my social kicks from Twitter. On a side note, Pownce tells me that I have 11 more invites to give away. If you were late getting on the bandwagon, but still want to go along for the ride, be sure to let me know in the comments if you want to be invited into the service.
Project Creative Sends Out First Newsletter
August 1, 2007 By 2 Comments
I received the first news letter from Project Creative today. The newsletter contained information about a LIVE, interactive podcast which was produced last week. To listen to the show click this link. Project Creative hopes to continue producing these sorts of podcasts via Talkshoe on a monthly basis. This gives users the opportunity to ask questions regarding the site. The podcast producers are actually the owners of the site and although I have yet to listen to their first show, I have to wonder what kind of questions were asked and which ones were answered considering project creative is not even in its invite-only stage.
Their full newsletter which is in PDF format does offer some more details about their service. Project Creative will have something to do with iLife Portal. PC has also chosen the open-source CMS Pligg to act as their content manager. I speculate that there will be some sort of main page where users will be able to vote things up or down, considering Pligg is the open source version of Digg.
If you want to read the newsletter for yourself, click the following link. Make sure you have a PDF reader installed such as Acrobat or my personal favorite FoxIT.
Ajax Edit Comments 1.1.1.0 Released
The following issues were addressed in this release:
The issues (with the exception of issue number 4) can occur on a case-by-case basis depending on blog configuration and character set.
Be sure to visit The Readers Appreciation Website to pick up the updated version or to grab it for the first time.