Netscape tried to copy Digg when it came out with its voting system some time ago. As expected, the move failed miserably. Netscape is now a pit of user bots, crap submissions, and a dwindling community.
AOL could have learned a lesson from that move, but it looks like they decided to ignore it. As reported by Tech Crunch, AOL is Beta testing a new portal design for it’s site.
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My earlier post requesting a Digg Widget hit the front page of Digg and slammed me with 7,000 visits today. The extra chunk of visits was nice, but the real bonus was the Digg Widgets that came with it.
The first one to come along was Mike’s version in the form of a Wordpress Plugin.
From the looks of it Mike will be putting a lot more into the plugin over the next few days.
The one that has me sold, however, is a flash version (shown above) by David LeMieux. The new Digg Widget pulls data from your Digg friends list and puts it in a scroller. The scroller then displays the title and number of Diggs for the most recent Diggs in your friends list. The widget also comes with a link to your user profile.
This should be complex to install right? Not at all. Simply go to the set up page, enter your user id, hit submit and copy the code.
David used my design concept for the widget and I must admit it looks quite nice.
Good job, guys! AND THANKS!!!
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My purpose for posting on the suggested Digg Widget is already bearing fruit.
Vino2Vino’s Mike jumped right on the challenge by pumping out a fairly simple Wordpress plugin that will display a user’s friend list of recent Diggs.
You can see the plugin in action here.
This is headed in the right direction, but it doesn’t yet have any style. I’m hoping to see someone help out in the style realm for those of us who know little about it.
Either way, a big thanks goes out to Mike for jumping on this and creating a plugin that gives us a great starting point.
Thanks Mike!
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I felt it fitting to post pictures of the newly released Digg Case Mod since as of the time of writing this I have received 3,000+ visits from Digg for the day.
My question is… where’s the order form?
HUGE hat top to the creator, Computer Choppers.
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As Digg grows more with each new day, many users, including myself, are looking for ways to better network with friends and content. I propose the Digg Widget to help do just that.
But first…
Jeremiah Hoyet has an excellent post called “Will Digg’s Growth Affect The Community?” over on his blog, reeverb.
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Yes, Digg traffic sucks for revenue compared to visits from Google. I know, I know… this is common knowledge for most. But, it’s still interesting none the less.
Chitika’s blog has a great post up about a stat finding hunt they recently went on related to the Digg traffic vs. Google traffic debate.
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The Digg bury feature will kill the site, and depict social news in a very bad way
While stopping in a small shop for a pack of chewing gum today I ran into a reader of my blog. This has never happened to me before, but I just moved to a smaller city and launched a local blog with the name of the city in the title. This has helped me suddenly start ranking for city related keywords. In turn, many locals are finding this particular blog. As it turns out, this individual had seen my picture on the blog and knew who I was at first site. Weird no?
The gentleman works in IT at a local software firm, and was loaded with questions regarding what I do and how I find time to maintain so many blogs. It was all interesting dialog, but the real kicker is a discussion that came up about Digg.com. Apparently the guys in his office had been talking about it a few days earlier and they had all drawn the conclusion that Digg had hit its peak and would probably begin to see declines in the very near future. But not only that, he also felt Digg was putting social news in general into a very bad reputation.
I couldn’t agree more.
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As much as it pains me to say this, several of the Republican candidates for President have a following that is playing downright dirty across the web. In fact, they’re flat out cheating, and we’ve caught them red handed.
What candidates have these cheating fan clubs? So far, we’ve been able to pinpoint large groups of cheaters who support Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, and Newt Gingrich. Granted, we can’t start pointing fingers at the candidates themselves, because we have no way of knowing if they are indeed involved. My guess is that they aren’t. But we should certainly contact them and let them know we think they should condemn such actions.
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Last night I had some free time to relax and take a break from the daily grind. Well, I didn’t really *have* time, but I made time. While most people kick back and watch the tube for relaxation, I surf the web with no real goals. So I decided to spend a little time on Netscape.
I’ve had an account with Netscape for six months now, but I’ve never really gotten around to surfing the pages or submitting news. Last night I decided to give it a go. I pulled up the RSS feeds and knocked out a few stories that had come up within the ten minutes of me checking. It gave me a chance to get a feel for the site and understand the differences between Netscape and Digg.
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It certainly appears that way. And Digg isn’t going out of its way to prove it isn’t the case. Last night my Digg account vanished for no reason at all. The message I got when I tried to login said that my account no longer existed due to “misuse”.
That’s odd, how would I have misused my account in the last week when I haven’t even USED the account in at least a week. And even when I was using it, I was only voting on OTHER stories for the most part. I hadn’t even Dugg one of my own stories in a month, so I couldn’t imagine what was going on.
I immediately contacted Digg asking what had happened. I used a very simple message that was polite and straight to the point.
Digg.com Staff,
Today I went to login to my account only to find that my user account is completely gone. What happened to it and why?
Please advise.
User Name: ericodom
-Eric
Before I shock you with the response, let’s have a re-cap of some of the posts I’ve made in the past about Digg.
Is this proof that Digg.com is biased?
Others Stories and posts:
Why is Digg being censored?
Fascists, Stalkers, and Moonbats, oh my!
Digg say hello to “fair and balanced”
It’s very clear that Digg is either actively working to diminish the influence found in stories that do not align with the beliefs of the left, or at least they allow Liberal user groups to game the system with the same agenda.
Was Digg biased against me in giving me the ban? It sure looks like it.
About 80% of the stories I Digg are what some would consider Conservative. I hide nothing in the way I vote and because of it my stories have never gotten any ground. Most of the time they will get a bunch of votes real quick, and then disappear into oblivion. Obviously, there is a group of users that serve no purpose other than to shoot content they disagree with politically right out of the sky.
Could it be that I was banned for being a Conservative? Not according to Digg. According to Digg I was banned for, brace yourself, ADULT CONTENT!
Adult content? Are you kidding me?
Your account was banned for violating Digg Terms Of Use by submitting
adult content.For more info: http://digg.com/tos
-The Digg Watch Team.
Ok, perhaps I *accidentally* submitted a page that had a banner ad or something on it that could have been deemed adult. I then replied to Digg to show me the story that was in question, as I couldn’t access the account to look for myself.
Then comes this response.
Sorry about that. It was an error on our side. Sorry for the
inconvenience caused.-The Digg Watch Team.
The account is now back online.
Come on Digg, you should be above this kind of game. There is no point in playing it. Either you’re fair, or you’re not.
Which is it?
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I very rarely EVER click on Google ads, but today an ad on Digg.com caught my eye. The title of the ad reads “Cligg - Clone of Digg”. The description of the ad reads “Use Our Quality Pligg Template & Grow ur Site Like Digg.com. Try Demo”.
I run a Pligg powered site so this interested me. I figured I would check out the template and see what the buzz was all about. But after clicking through to the page of the ad, www.moonrank.com, I found NOTHING of the sort. In fact, Moon Rank’s website, for lack of a better word, was complete crap. There is no template on the page being advertised, no “free demo” on the page, and as far as I can see there isn’t even any Pligg templates available for viewing on the site being linked to.
Personally, I find it offensive that a site such as this has the audacity to spam the Digg community with the hopes of gaining clients who are willing to pay to have a custom Pligg template built.
Would it be fair to say that this company is actively using Google Adsense to spam Digg.com?
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There is a BIG shift in the way political campaigns conduct election war these days. During the 2006 elections I was contracted to do some work for Sharron Angle for Congress and it was a very educational experience and the race taught us many things about the new direction of political campaign marketing.
In our race for congress we were lucky that the opposition had little experience in online marketing. The reason we were lucky is that I had my hands full with other parts of the campaign and couldn’t spend any time on the website or out and about in the www community.
In the end we lost by about 400 votes, but the knowledge that came from working on such a campaign is something I’m thankful for. I was able to see one of our opponents get ripped to shreds by the online community because he virtually ignored them and his site did everything possible to avoid having to engage the group. At the time, this attitude worked because the social networks of Nevada were limited. Now, however, these networks have gained big momentum and I believe that if we were to see a repeat of that race he would have a very tough time slipping by without getting the online community involved.
The same can be said across the country. With more and more voters and activists moving their networks to the web, political campaigns are forced to move in that direction with their campaign plans and message marketing schemes. I believe we’re witnessing the birth of a new era in US elections.
Political campaigns would be wise to lend an ear to this massive movement of information and there are a plethora of tools that can help them do just that. I’ve compiled a list of what I believe will be the top ten players in internet activism.
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As a campaign consultant and internet activist I can attest to the direction political campaigns are heading and a LOT of it is shifting to the Internet. Political campaigns such as John McCain’s (by the way I met with his blogger, Patrick Hynes, in DC last week and he admitted that the McCain website was launched with a lot of bugs and was not ready to be public) have fully embraced the power of social networking and the online community, and most other campaigns are beginning to do the same thing.
Digg.com is getting in on the action as well. Digg recently added a 2008 Elections category and it quickly became a happening place. Wikia has also added a political section that in just a matter of days was getting Dugg and mentioned on big sites like Little Green Footballs.
YouTube must be seeing dollar signs in this as well. The video sharing giant recently launched “YouChoose“, a sub-site for political campaign related videos to be published and viewed.
When you have Hillary Clinton announcing her Presidency via a YouTube video, you know it’s a powerful tool.
Even the group I work with as a private contractor, Citizen Outreach, is getting ready to publish a YouTube channel that will display news related to Nevada politics and other tidbits. It’s some thing we feel is too important to pass up.
While YouTube is taking hits on the copyright front, it is still growing and I think Google is pulling the right strings by adding this new YouChoose section.
Only time will tell if it’s successful though…
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I’m beginning to agree that Digg just might be looking to sell out. I’ve been heading towards this agreement for a few months now, but never really reached the point where I thought it would really happen until now.
I’ve posted about issues with Digg in the past and I’ve read through countless posts about Digg. As pointed out by Tech Spews, Digg has done nothing to stop the Bury Brigade from prevailing in