If you wanted to imagine a topsy-turvy world where straight 19-year-old jock-nerds ran the media, just visit Digg. The site is so laden with antigay epithets that it automatically censors the word "homo" from headlines.
Yet another Digg clone, targeted at a small slice of the news market. Isn't Tip'd exactly the kind of me-too company the bursting of the bubble is supposed to crowd out? VentureBeat, strangely, calls the site's launch "timely." And yet the best times for financial-information sites, in terms of having matter to cover, …
Click to viewConventional wisdom has it that males on the Internet gravitate toward pictures of pretty women like hungry honeybees to a sugary tulip, and click, click, click. It's why Tila Tequila has 3,345,634 MySpace friends and Tania Derveaux has 108,907 YouTube subscribers. It's why, on social news site Digg, so…
How do TechCrunch stories make it to Digg's front page so often? With a little help from its friends, of course. Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley, now a foe of editor Michael Arrington, posted a screenshot from his inbox revealing what Riley calls "The TechCrunch Digg Club." It includes four writers from…
Chris Anderson, Wired's waggle-eared rock-star editor, has been dropping hints left and right about the relaunch of HotWired, a faded Web property Conde Nast picked up along with Webmonkey last month. The rumor we've heard: That Wired is relaunching the site as a news-focused social network like Digg. (Conde Nast…
The traffic boost from Digg-front-page glory only lasts a few hours. Getting an article picked up by eBay's StumbleUpon, however, can drive sweet, sweet traffic for weeks and months. So search-engine optimization expert Dharmesh Shah and social media marketer Lyndon Antcliff's "28 Tips to Make You a StumbleUpon…
Social news aggregator — that is to say, Digg clone — Reddit is working on a redesign. Online media consultant Brent Csutoras landed leaked screenshots. We've annotated them for your convenience.
If you make your living publishing content on the Internet, you live and die by the pageview. One way to drive huge amounts of traffic to your site is through "social news" sites like Digg. If I write something interesting, the theory goes, someone may submit my article to Digg. If it gets enough votes, it hits the…
Digg founder Kevin Rose typically cites "the need for diversity" when questioned or criticized about the promotion algorithm that controls what stories make it to Digg's front page. "One of the keys to getting a story promoted is diversity in Digging activity. When the algorithm gets the diversity it needs, it will…
Everyone's seen the iPhone stopwatch reach a thousand hours. With that in mind, we decided to Digg a Digg story. Would it rip a hole in the fabric of our existence?
Some enterprising young lad submitted Fark.com to Digg — eight days ago. Fark predates Digg by several years. It has elements of social news like Digg, but it's more in the spirit of the Daily Show than Digg's Slashdot-inspired tech obsessions. Submitter "topsyturvy" described it on Digg as "Fark: the not news news…
As far as Digg users are concerned, Ron Paul, Steve Jobs and slobbering dogs have nothing on Britney's latest baby. Digg and StumbleUpon users click most on stories related to celebrity gossip, videogames, and online clips, according to clickstream data from metrics firm Hitwise. Digg accounts for half of all visits…
I like Digg: sometimes I find good links there. However, the people who claim that "social masses are the future of news" are barking up the wrong planet. The masses are stupid. A flash game with an animated Hillary Clinton falling through bubbles got more than 4,000 diggs yesterday. Now, that's nothing compared to a …
IAC's Ask.com launched its Digg-infused answer to Google News today. But there's surprisingly little evidence of help from Digg in Ask's Big News, despite the project's all-too-long time spent in development. Why is that?
Digg and IAC's Ask.com search engine are getting close to launching an Ask-branded version of the popular headline-voting site. We'd heard in December that the two companies were working together. Indeed, the delay in the project's launch may have contributed to Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone's ouster. Without Lanzone, the…
The News Corp.-owned Times of London has been paying a search-engine optimizer to do the dirty work of shilling Times Online stories to social media sites like Mahalo, StumbleUpon, and MetaFilter. We can't believe it either — that The Times is actually paying an outside firm to submit stories. My boss makes me do it…
"A lot of these community news sites are all about Ron Paul. Ron Paul may be a valid candidate. But what that is really demonstrating is that you are seeing 1 or 2 percent of a community shaping where the whole community is going. A small dedicated group of people can manipulate these sites very easily... With sites…
After users submit a story, image or video to Digg, the site asks users to review similar submissions and make sure the new item isn't a duplicate of an existing article being voted for on the site. The tool is a marvel of modern precision. For example, notice how, in this accompanying screen shot, Digg's algorithm…
I've always preferred editorially controlled news sources like Fark and the Drudge Report. I'm more likely to find links that I think are interesting. On "social news" sites like Digg, readers get endless Ron Paul and Apple links, as fanboys constantly vote for their preferred subjects. Occasionally though, something…
Kevin Rose started Digg specifically to give users the power to decide what's news. It must be a pain to see some of his top users quit the site and write an open letter charging him with "disregard for the Digg community," "lack of transparency," and "flagrant disrespect of top users." They were angry that a sudden…
