Is Digg Broken?
Digg is a community-based website that allows its registered users to submit stories or articles that they feel might be of interest to others. Once submitted, the story appears as a link to the original source as well as a short description of the content. Other registered Digg users can then evaluate the content and either “Digg” or “Bury” the story depending on if they find it interesting or not. The theory is that those stories that get “Dugg” a lot will end up on the front page, while those that do not will vanish into obscurity.
The idea of having users rank content is a good one, but unfortunately Digg does not seem to work this way, which brings me to the point of this article. Digg is broken. Deliberately or not, it is failing to function in three very important ways:
1) Digg is censorship:
The way Digg figures out which story to promote to the front page is not based as much on how many people have “Dugg” it as it is on which particular user “Dugg” the story to begin with. If you are a user that is very active within the Digg community and have “Dugg” a large number of stories that end up being popular, the stories you “Digg” are far more likely to end up on the front page than stories that get “Dugg” by new users with no reputation.
Why is this a problem? Because when you go to Digg, you are only seeing links that a relatively small, elite group of Digg users want you to see. The vast majority of stories that get “Dugg” end up being relegated to obscurity because they were “Dugg” by average, everyday users and not the Digg elite.
2) Digg users are nasty:
When a story gets “Dugg” users have the ability to comment on it. Not only are these comments usually of little to no actual value, but they are often cruel and nasty as well. For a case in point look here.
When a California woman recently gave birth to a healthy baby just two days after learning she was pregnant, the sudden change to her life was challenging enough. What April Branum definitely didn’t need was a deluge of nasty Internet comments.
wow legal action for voicing our opinions. what the fu** is America coming too. And really, they are trying to get us to sympathize with a fat slob who didn’t realize she was pregnant for 9 months? What kind of piece of sh** article is this. This is the most ridiculous thing i have read all week.
I’m the first to defend free speech, but the nasty comments that are so pervasive in Digg does not build community; it destroys it! What I don’t think these mean-spirited commenters realize is that such harsh words actually serve to silence people, taking away their voice that is protected by the first amendment. They don’t comment because they don’t want to deal with the angry, childish comments spewed fourth by many Digg users.
3) Digg readers generate traffic that is of minimal use to web publishers:
Having a story show up on the front page of Digg can generate an amazing amount of traffic to the author’s website. As a rule, this is a wonderful thing for any web publisher, but not so with Digg. The reason for this has to do with the way many sites earn money. Web publishers often make use of advertising on their site such as Google’s Adsense or Yahoo’s YPN. These ad services present visitors with contextual ads that they can click on should one of them seem useful. Each time a visitor clicks on an ad, the owner of the website earns some money for the referral.
Digg users almost NEVER click on ads!
I am in a position to have the actual statistics for three individual sites that use advertising and have had stories appear on the front page of Digg.
CTR stands for “Click Through Ratio” and is a measure of what percentage of visitors click through on an ad.
ECPM is a measure of an ad’s effective earnings per thousand impressions.
Example #1 Average CTR and ECPM: CTR = 3.03% ECPM = $2.57 CTR and ECMP on Digg day: CTR = 0.79% ECPM = $1.10 Example #2 Average CTR and ECPM: CTR = 2.93% ECPM = $1.35 CTR and ECMP on Digg day: CTR = 0.86% ECPM = $0.67 Example #3 Average CTR and ECPM: CTR = 4.12% ECPM = $3.80 CTR and ECMP on Digg day: CTR = 0.28% ECPM = $0.47
Which ads are shown to visitors and how Google or Yahoo decides which sites get the best paying ads to present is proprietary technology, but there seems to be a correlation with higher paying ads being presented on sites that have a high CTR. When a story gets “Dugg” the overall traffic goes WAY up, but the CTR goes WAY down, meaning Adsense or YPN most likely conclude the ads that are being presented are not targeting correctly. The theory goes that they then change out the higher paying ads that are being presented for lower paying ones so they can try to get them targeting well again. This is disastrous for the web publisher because the ads often don’t start performing well again for several days, even after the Digg traffic dies down.
To be fair, however, it is important to note that traffic is traffic and anytime a large number of people read a story the author is much more likely to receive incoming links, resulting in the all-important increase to Google rank. Still, one has to consider if gaining a few incoming links is worth the other headaches that come with being “Dugg”. Many people, for instance, experience major problems with their hosting provider when they receive all the traffic that Digg generates.
Digg is not pure evil, and despite all its problems, the service does seem to offer some value to its readers. I do have to call into question, however, the wisdom of web publishers making an effort to get onto Digg’s front page. I would conclude by strongly encouraging the architects of Digg to think long and hard about their strategic goals. The internet works best when it is used as a leveler to give everyone a voice on an even playing field. Digg’s tendency to reward its elite users, while silencing those who are less active runs counter to this principle and indicates serious moral problems with its design.
Google Analytics is Cool
So after being frustrated yesterday by not having any pretty Google Analytics reports to look at, they finally crunched up some data for me, and this morning I was able to start kicking the tires.
First assessment… WOW! They generate a report for just about anything you could possibly what to know, including things like what major ISP’s your viewers are coming from. My personal favorite is the Geo Map Overlay which uses Google Maps to show what parts of the world your traffic is originating from. I was really surprised to see how many international visitors found their way here. Maybe it’s because I, like the rest of the world, think our President is an uneducated Neanderthal.
Additionally cool is the idea that Google Analytics is a sucker punch to Microsoft. Hey, I love anything that hurts Microsoft. They don’t suck as much as our President, but they’re sure as hell trying.
Some analysts saw the timing of Google’s latest announcement as significant: It came on the heels of a Microsoft (MSFT) manifesto that Web and ad-subsidized services were the future (see BW Online, 11/10/05, “Microsoft: Ozzie’s Online Charge”). “It’s a bit of a slap of the face to Microsoft, reminding them, ‘We’re in this game,’” says Marc Strohlein, vice-president and lead analyst at Outsell, a market research firm.
For my part, my only complaint is that they don’t update update the data often enough, and they seem to have some gaps in the data they’ve collected. For instance, this morning, they thought I had had 400 visits, when in reality I had 1136 just yesterday according to bstat. They have been up and down because of high load over the past few days though, so the discrepancy is understandable. Apparently they have had a whole lot of people signing up since they went public.
Of course, the data will become much more useful over the long term, so it will be interesting to see how people are using the site, and what they like and don’t like.
Yes Al, I already know you hate the political rants.
Google Analytics - No Data
After reading about Google’s new Analytics tool yesterday, I signed up for an account and got spiralbound.net and twistedstitches.net logging to it. I quickly logged in this morning, all excited to see my reports (I’m pathetic, I know) but there were no reports to be seen. DAMN! Anyhow, I figured out that I have to have a “Conversion Goal” in order for it to start tracking statistics. I’ll RTFM next time.
“Conversion Goals” are really meant to track how what people got to what pages, but they can be as simple a my “Someone is at my site” goal which is a simple count of anyone on any spiralbound.net page. I also set up a conversion goal to track comments. We’ll see how it all plays out. According to Google, it will take 12 hours before I see anything.
Google Blog Search
I’ve been saying for a long time that the world needs a good blog search engine, and Erich points out that the people who do search engines best have finally stepped up to the plate and come out with one. Google has just released the first beta (I know… Google has everything in beta) of its blog search.
My favorite blog search engines up to this point have been Mnongo and Technorati. Both are quite good, although competing with Google on the search engine front has proven difficult even for the largest and most powerful technology players. After tinkering with Google Blog Search for a bit, I have to say that it seems pretty good. It’s never quite clear how Google gathers their info and ranks their sites, although they do seem to lend quite a bit of weight to tags.
Here is what Google has to say about it:
Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.
Blogs are really quite powerful tools, and I’m glad to see that the world is taking them more and more seriously every day.
Microsoft CEO Vows to “Kill Google”
Microsoft loves to stage hostile takeovers of competing companies and hire their best employees away from them, but apparently the sfotware giant just can’t take it when it happens to them.
We all remember the temper tantrum Microsoft threw when a senior executive named Kai-Fu Lee left the company to work for Google in July. Microsoft claimed Lee’s jump to Google was in violation of a one-year noncompete agreement and proceeded to file a suit against Google for hiring him.
If this was a public display of childish behavior on Microsoft’s part, it would soon come out that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s private reactions to top employees leaving the company can be down right infantile.
In a sworn statement made public Friday, Mark Lucovsky, another Microsoft senior engineer who left for Google in November 2004, gave a disturbing account of Ballmer’s reaction to news that the would be leaving.
“At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: ‘Just tell me it’s not Google,’” Lucovosky indicated that, indeed, he would be working for Google
“At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office,” He then flew into a rage of anger and expletives about Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
“I’m going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f***ing kill Google.”
Steve Ballmer is no stranger to stomping around and acting stupid. As we can see in his Monkey Dance Video, this is clearly a guy with some issues to work out! I, for one, have to ask the question… With him looking to “Kill Google” and “bury” Eric Schmidt Is Steve Ballmer a terrorist like Pat Robertson?
