Social News Watch » Social Internet

Digg Front Page Hits Ludicrous Speed

JD Rucker — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:46:30 +0000

Following last week’s secret alpha testing at Digg headquarters, today’s front page went crazy.

In the last 10.5 hours, there have been over 150 stories that hit the front page. To put that into perspective, there are normally between 80-120 stories that hit the front page in a full day.

Last week, several Digg users were invited for NDA-protected alpha testing of potential changes to Digg. Today’s acceleration may be connected. More likely, it’s a tweak to the algorithm that will be corrected soon (if it isn’t already).

Digg moves quickly, so if this continues for another day or two, we’re probably looking at a glimpse of the future.

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“The Secret Masters of Digg” to Speak at ROFLCon

JD Rucker — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:53:57 +0000

While I don’t necessarily agree with the titling, it will be an honor to be on a panel with MrBabyMan and MSaleem at the 2010 ROFLCon. From April 30 through May 1, we’ll be touring the hallowed halls of MIT and rubbing elbows with some of the brightest content creators, meme creators, and memes themselves in this second annual event.

From the site:

“Another two days and two nights of the most epic internet culture conference ever assembled. Informed commentators suggest that this may be the most important gathering of humanity since the fall of the tower of Babel. And yes, we’re still looking to get Goatse.”

Our panel will not be the standard “How to become a Digg poweruser” babble that often hits these. Instead, we’ve been asked to go deep into the inner-workings pointing to the “history of the backroom culture of power users, politics/machinations with site management, and the future of Digg (and social news) generally.”

For more information, check out the page they created on ROFLCon for our panel. Again, I had nothing to do with the title.

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Toyota hits Digg and I must say I like it

JD Rucker — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:44:29 +0000

When I first saw the advertisement that Toyota had placed on Digg.com, I was skeptical. After all, Digg and most social news sites in general are not considered a “PR venue” to help in times of crisis.

After reviewing their landing page and seeing exactly how they have integrated, I have to say that I like it.

With the recent Toyota recalls putting a major blemish on the formerly-bulletproof automaker, they have begun an aggressive campaign to regain the trust of their loyal consumers.

The Toyota landing page rests on the Digg.com domain and highlights stories broken down into three categories:

About the Recall
Toyota Responds
Featured Toyota Articles

Stories that are posted to Digg.com are classified under these categories and presented for people to refer to, Digg, or bury the stories. There are no instructions, no prompting, just a place to learn more. That part, I like.

The recent Digg Dialogue with Toyota US President Jim Lentz is also on the page, again a plus and a good move.

The only part I don’t like is not having a contact stream. It would have been nice for Digg users to leave comments directly for Toyota. While this may seem dangerous, it appeals to the open form of communication that Toyota has adopted over the last week. They have issues, and they’re willing to talk through them. Not a huge deal, as there are plenty of ways to contact Toyota, but that would have been a nice addition to the landing page.

Digging deeper, you’ll see an ad on the landing page that goes to Toyota.com itself, specifically to another landing page that has a way to get all of the information anyone would need regarding the recall. The look and feel of the page is nicely structured for Web 2.0 and demonstrates a change in the way the company engages with its customers. It’s a shame that it had to come at this time based upon a need rather than before when it could have been used for marketing, but better late than never.

I look forward to seeing what Toyota is going to do next. This is their darkest hour, and despite a few miscues in the beginning, they’re coming on strong with these recent additions to their PR machine.

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Social News “Darling” Imgur Has Staggering Statistics

JD Rucker — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:53:14 +0000

When Imgur.com first hit the scene a year ago, it quickly became the “hip” way to post, host, and share images on Reddit. Digg took notice and it soon became the most popular image site there as well.

A year later, one thing is certain – Imgur’s numbers as a result are nothing short of amazing. While these numbers are nothing compared to more well-known image sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, or Imageshack, it is still impressive considering that the traffic is almost entirely social media driven.

Click to see the full view.

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Social News is Mainstream News

JD Rucker — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:05:28 +0000

Social News sites like Digg and Reddit have built a reputation for being focused on 2 things: the offbeat and the tech-oriented. Mainstream media has shied away from using the social news aggregation sites because they didn’t believe their stories would do well.

Times have changed.

Social news is mainstream news. In a recent study, we discovered that Digg, the most prominent social news site with over 40 million visitors per month, has shifted to embrace mainstream media sites within their community. The top 50 sites once controlled 46% of the Digg front page, but this has dropped to 41% in recent months and is trending to continue to diversify.

Over 20% of the Digg front page is populated by the top 25 mainstream media sites like The Telegraph, NY Times, and Time, but it’s not just the giants that are finding success on Digg. Smaller mainstream media publications such as ChicagoNow and CityPages have also enjoyed the boost in both traffic and inbound links associated with a Digg front page.

It makes sense. Getting to the front page of sites like Digg on a regular basis increases exposure along many lines. Many feed links they find on Digg through other media sites, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. The content that is found on the Digg front page is considered “vetted” by the community, as stories that don’t meet the communities standard are “buried”.

Still, there are challenges. With an estimated 20,000+ stories submitted to Digg every day, only 120 or so are promoted. How can websites, even mainstream media sites, get the exposure and benefits of a Digg front page? That answer to that question can only be found on Digg itself. There is a general feel that most stories share. It can’t be described or explained. Those who understand Digg well can look at a story and know within seconds whether it’s Digg-material or not.

Social news IS mainstream news. In the tumultuous world of print publications, taking advantage of the resources available will be the difference between those who survive and flourish and those who fall under the weight that the Internet has imposed on them.

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How to Not get Banned on StumbleUpon

Tammy Rucker — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:15:05 +0000

For me, StumbleUpon is a great place to make connections, see great pictures, and find articles or sites that I would otherwise not be exposed to. The whole idea of SU is to share great finds with your friends and for great content to get exposure.

This concept has evolved, to say the least. Now you may be exposed to sites that are not relevant to your preferences just because it has been thumbed up many times by your friends, and their friends, and so on. These sites have been “pushed” through the system, for the sake of traffic/views. Recently SU has been trying to combat this situation by adding the share feature, and even offering advertisement etc. In addition, they are banning “circles” of mutuals that seem to be sharing, thumbing, and reviewing the same sites.

If you happen to be in one of these “circles,” you run the risk of getting “ghost” banned or completely banned.

Ghost Banned on StumbleUpon: You can thumb up, thumb down, discover… pretty much anything a regular user can do. The only thing is, your efforts don’t count. You can tell if you’re “ghost banned” by discovering a page, opening up a different browser, and visiting the review page of the site you just discovered. If it says “Discovered by someone” and not you, you’re a ghost. No word yet on how to reverse this.

Here are some things to avoid:

As you know the share feature can be pretty annoying. I usually have around 50 pages waiting for me a day, and it’s very hard to keep up with. Most of the pages sent to me are from my social media friends who are also on Digg, Reddit, etc. They are sending me things they like or want to promote. Now, this is actually not against TOS as long as it isn’t their personal site, however, it’s usually a site that is beneficial to them in some way, and that is against TOS.

SU has caught on to this particular “gaming” of the system, and therfore they are banning not only the people who own the site who are “pushing” it, but the people who actually thumb these sites up often. This may seem a little unfair because you are just trying to be nice and a good social media friend. Just giving it a thumb shouldn’t be that harmful to you. However, it is necessary on their part if you think about it. I have been very weary of discovering my friend’s sites since the banning initially began several months ago. I personally will discover what I truly like, and what I feel is relevant to my basic theme or what I believe in, but I can no longer do this for some of my favorites, and this to me is the unfortunate part.

Unfortunately, the friends who have good content will have to understand that you cannot keep thumbing up their stuff all the time. If you continue to do this for anyone, you will be flagged eventually. Remember, you don’t have to review it, you just have to thumb it and it becomes a red flag when you do this often for the same source. Once you get banned or ghost banned, you could lose all the hard work you have put into your discoveries.

The whole point is for diversity. SU wants different sources. They want content from around the Internet – good content/pictures that deserve exposure based on what people like to see/read. In order to assure this, they must not encourage the same sites getting pushed through the preference pages simply because your friends shared it with a ton of other friends who all thumb it just because they asked them to through the share feature. You would not be exposed to anything other than a handful of sites if this continued.

In conclusion, your best bet is to just say NO. You are not obligated to thumb every page sent to you. If you are wanting to have reciprocated thumbs or reviews when you have a good site etc..then they will thumb it without you asking if it’s good. If you are discovering spammy sites whose content isn’t really any good, then SU is not the place to go. One thing to keep in mind is the timing. Make sure that some of your top friends are online before you make a discovery if you are wanting it to get exposure immediately. In theory, they will see the page even if you don’t sent it if they’re subscribed to you. If the content is good enough, it will get thumbs and reviews.

The only way to get loyal subscribers however, is to make sure you are discovering worthy material. They will follow you.

Many serious users on SU are picky about what they are looking at, and if they notice they are being forced to view things that are not their preference or the same sources day after day, they will flag you or just stop looking all together.

Another tip is if you mistag a discovery, you might as well just pack it up. There was a time when marketers/spammers were tagging their content with “viewable” or popular tags in order for it to be seen more often. However, their tags were not relevant and were misleading. These people were banned pretty quickly. Just be mindful of your tags – make certain it fits.

Send stuff to different friends each time, not just everyone all the time if you plan on doing the share feature often. Make sure the content you are sending them is at the very least pretty good and from different sources. Chances are, if it’s not interesting enough for you to read it or look at it yourself, then they won’t either and you will get a “blind” thumb. Eventually this will lead to you and them getting banned. If you have a good post, and most of your friends thumb it or give it a review without you asking, don’t be fearful of it being flagged just because most of your friends thumbed it up because chances are that if they did this without you asking, others who are not your friends will as well (this is how you get new subscribers and friends in the first place). This is very good for you simply because it shows that you are reaching a more diverse audience based on a good post/discovery, rather than a forced one, and SU will see that. You will be more rewarded on SU for having good content more than most places. SU also loves good pictures, and it’s a great place to find some never-seen-before photography etc.

For those of you who are planning on using it as a traffic generator, your time will be short if you are posting trash or asking the same people to thumb the same stuff all the time. That is the difference I have noticed on SU versus any of the other social media sites, and that is why it’s my favorite place to be on the Internet.

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Imgur.com: How Images are Done on Social News Sites

JD Rucker — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:42:09 +0000

Imgur.com understands social media better than any other image-storage service on the Internet.

“How the hell did flickr get through our defenses?”

They started by posting high-quality, original humorous images. They then got the attention of Reddit but being the “go to pic place”. Digg and other social news sites are starting to get it.

How did they get so strong so quickly? They kept it simple.

Shortened URL instantly
Two clicks to post
Link straight to the image without ads
???????
Profit

They are everything that tinypic isn’t. You don’t need an account. You don’t need an email. You find an image, post it, and score. It owns the Pics subreddit, a huge one with over 130K subscribers. It’s the most common image source on Digg now with more front pages every day. In short, Imgur understands how to appeal to social media users. If alexa is to be trusted, it’s worked. Their reach has increased by 392% in 3 months and they are closing in on being a top 2000 site in the world.

While they aren’t nearly as big as imageshack, tinypic, or flickr, it should only be a matter of time for them to build up the site-bulk required to compete with other image services. Either way, we give them mega-kudos to really understanding Web 2.0.

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Top 237 Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back

JD Rucker — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 03:52:13 +0000

As Twitter hits its stride and emerges as a juggernaut in social media, the top users on the site are distancing themselves from the pack. The race to 1,000,000 followers will be achieved in a few months by some accounts. With such strong followings, many new or inactive Twitter users may not think that there are top accounts that will follow them back.

On the contrary, there are many. In fact, many users with tens of thousands of followers will follow just about everyone back. Some use tools to automatically follow anyone who follows them. Others actually go through and manually add their new followers. Regardless of the method, these 237 accounts will most likely follow you back, even if you’re a Twitter newbie.

(image source: ProBlogger’s excellent article about growing your Twitter presence)

100,000+ Followers

50,000-100,000 Followers

40,000-50,000 Followers

30,000-40,000 Followers

20,000-30,000 Followers

10,000-20,000 Followers

How to Use this List

Regardless of what stage you are in Twitter, if your goal is to accumulate active followers, the people on this list are good for that. Most on the list are active and interact with their followers on a daily basis. They retweet to their followers when they find something interesting on or off Twitter and many of them post high-quality tweets.

Some do not, and you’ll be able to identify the spammers and self-serving users from what appears in your stream. This list has not been validated for quality (maybe a future blog post) but rather to help new and experienced users grow their followers.

Unfortunately, I did the list backwards. Anyone who wants to grow their Twitter account should start from the bottom and work their way up, adding all 237 either all at once or spread out over time. The advantage of adding from this list is two-fold:

Obviously, as these users have demonstrated a willingness to follow those who follow them, it gives you a likely additional follower.

The side-benefit of adding from this list is that once you follow them, your account will, for a short period of time, be at the top of their followers list. Many users build their Twitter followers by adding the followers of users such as these, so being at the top increases your account’s exposure and the number of opportunities for other users to follow you.

This blog does not condone “Twitter Follower Spam” or whatever you would like to call the practice of adding a ton of followers, unfollowing them later, and adding more in a vicious cycle of growth, but hey, it works, and many people do it. This is just a resource to help users at every level build their accounts as quickly as they would like.

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Just Feed XKCD to the Digg Front Page and get it over with

JD Rucker — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:49:19 +0000

XKCD will hit the front page of Digg. Every time. No exceptions.

The often brilliant webcomic XKCD is published on particular days and at particular times during the week. The clockwork nature of the posts is followed by several Digg users because every post will hit the front page. The chances of a Kevin Rose submission missing the front page is higher than the chances of XKCD missing.

As a result, every post is submitted multiple times within seconds after it goes live. Because Digg does not “lock out” submissions once they are started, everyone who starts submitting before the first one is completed will be able to continue their submission.

Once submitted, the real work begins. With the multiple submissions, the race to get it to the front page requires the submitter to accumulate as many Diggs as possible in a short time.

Other sites like Cracked and APOD pose similar dilemmas. They are also published at specified times, are normally submitted by multiple people, and will most likely hit the front page at least once.

If we can assume that the quality of the content on these three sites will be high (as it normally is) and they are going to hit the front page of Digg (as they normally do), why not just feed them directly to the front page as soon as they’re published?

In reality, Digg would never do such a thing. In reality, they couldn’t and shouldn’t as it would hurt the integrity of the site.

In reality, Digg should:

Fix the dupe filter (which, to their credit, they say they’re working on)
Figure out a way to lock out duplicate submissions from the same URL

It doesn’t seem hard to implement a lock out feature. Even if multiple users start a submission, once the first person “swears it’s original” and posts it, the others should not be able to submit. “Sorry, too late, someone just submitted it.”

Of course, if they do it, the race to submit those sites would be that much more interesting.

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Read more social news analysis on Social News Watch.

The Simple Truth About Digg’s Lack of Profits

JD Rucker — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:06:10 +0000

It was hard. For as long as I can remember, I have not been one who clicks on banner ads. Heck, in most cases, I don’t even see them (thank you FF).

A friend of mine who is an avid reader turned me onto Audible.com to download audio books. With recent articles in BusinessWeek and TechCrunch about the financial woe’s they’re having at Digg, I remembered seeing an Audible ad on Digg and thought, why not?

I’m going to be signing up for the service anyway. Why not throw a bone to the site that consumes a ton of my time?

The results weren’t good:

These things happen. I sent an email to Digg pointing out the issue and waited. It is now 4 days later. I surfed Digg, doing my thing, checking every time I went to a new page to see if my target ad had found me. It eventually did, but still, it didn’t work.

Another thing I noticed was the quality and targeting on the ads. There has to be a reason why the estimates (well over $100,000,000 through 3 years) of the Microsoft ad deal were so far above the reality (less than $10,000,000 per year). After looking at the ads, there were more problems than just my audible ad not working.

As you can see by the ads to the left, there are concerns. In one, you appeal to the male demographic with a pretty girl and cleavage offering images of local singles. I would venture a guess that these ads are among the most clicked. Still, with social media being populated by people on the “cutting edge” of Internet technology, one would think that paying for images of local singles was, well, below the curve for Diggers.

The other image points to a diet plan. It is Maria’s diet, to be specific. While there are, I’m sure, men for whom this would appeal (I could use a few dozen pounds off after Christmas), it is clearly targeted towards women. Women are becoming a stronger force on Digg, but it’s still probably around 20% of the total demographic.

Was this all part of the original plan? When Digg signed a 3-year plan (which is extremely long for any advertising platform, even one with a name like Microsoft) were they aware that the ads would be either off-target or lacking of the most remote chances for a paid conversion?

Here are some others that don’t really need an explanation. Take a peek and ask, “Are these targeting me?”

These aren’t terrible. It could be worse. Actually, it is worse. Look below at a pair of ads that are clearly not designed with Digg users in mind. First, you see the Hyundai ad. Digg users are pretty good at noticing mistakes in images. It comes with the territory. For some reason, the Hyundai ad wasn’t sized right and cuts off. That mistake is nothing compared to having a Comcast ad on the page. This is Digg. The community is one of the most outspoken about Comcast. The conversion rates are most likely next to nothing for this ad.

For those of us who are in the market to build new social media sites, it hurts us when the numbers at one of the top social media sites is so dismal. Hopefully, potential investors will see that it’s not that these sites can’t make money. For some reason, they simply choose not to. With that said, here’s one last image to leave you with:

Read more about social news sites at Social News Watch.