Has Digg Been Buried?

As Facebook and Twitter continue to grow in popularity, social bookmarking sites like Digg have seen their own traffic and usage wane.  The question of late has been whether or not a site like Digg is still relevant.  It’s not a secret that for years Digg has been the subject of controversy as users complained a small group was controlling submission popularity.  Regardless of how that battle went down, one thing is for certain — Digg is not the powerhouse it once was.

In response to steadily decreasing traffic, Digg launched Digg v4, a newer, sleaker, cooler version of the once groundbreaking social bookmarking site.  A new CEO, Matt Williams, was brought on board, and there was hope for Digg’s future.  Then Digg v4 launched and Digg’s problems exploded.  Suffice it to say, the new version of Digg had performance problems, missing pieces (for example, users’ submission histories disappeared), and a renaming of critical elements (for example, submissions that users could previously ‘bury’ if they didn’t like that content, they could now only ‘hide’).  Confusion and complaints from the Digg user community were loud, and Digg has been trying to pick up the pieces for the past month and a half since Digg v4 debuted.

Yesterday, Digg CEO Matt Williams published his response to the Digg v4 controversy on the Digg blog.  He wrote:

“As many of you know, the launch of Digg v4 didn’t go smoothly, and we’re deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process. Thank you for your patience and your extremely candid feedback — we hear you loud and clear. … Digg has always been a place where users help one another find out what’s interesting, fun, and important. Unfortunately, our re-launch managed to get in the way of that happening. I don’t need to tell you that without the Digg community, we’re just another news web site. So we’re working hard to quickly improve the Digg experience. Our top priority is to make Digg as good as it used to be. Then we plan to make it even better, through innovations in both Top News and My News.”

It’s interesting that Williams would refer to Digg as being “just another news site” without the participation of the Digg community.  He’s absolutely right about that.  Many social bookmarking sites have become little more than aggregators.  Now, the question is whether or not Digg truly will come out of this controversy as a better business, brand and site.  In other words, will Digg still be relevant a year from now or has Digg been buried?

What do you think?  Leave a comment and weigh in on the debate.

Image: stock.xchng

Performancing Blogosphere Roundup – May 18, 2010

You might already know that social news and voting site Digg is undergoing some changes that’ll be rolled out in the near future. But if you want a glimpse of what the changes might be, TechCrunch has an annotated version of a picture that Digg CEO Kevin Rose tweeted over the weekend, with a bit of an analysis. The picture is of Rose’s MacBook Pro screen, though the sun’s glare makes it a bit difficult to see much. (An updated picture, albeit smaller, shows the screen more clearly.) From TechCrunch has gleaned, it appears that the new Digg will be even more social, with user avatars showing more prominently, embedded status updates related to story items and more. [Image courtesy of X64bit.]

Do you do a lot of downloading, screen captures, podcasting, video blogging or screencasting? Well then Seagate has a monster hard drive for growing data storage needs. Thinq is reporting that Seagate has confirmed an upcoming 3TB drive for later this year. That’s TeraBytes, as in 1,000 times a GigaByte. My MacBook Pro’s 500GB drive is filling up awfully fast, but that’s due to photo and video work I’m doing with my wife, a filmmaker. I have a few internal drives in my blogging setup, though one is for backups and the other requires two USB ports and gets whiny sometimes and simply doesn’t function. While a 3TB drive does sound tempting, from a purely mechanical point of view, I’d much rather have three 1TB drives or six 500GB drives. This would allow you to assign drives for different purposes, and if one fails, you don’t lose all your data.

Postrank is reporting that traditional hosted blog platforms such as Blogspot, WordPress and Typepad are still way ahead of supposedly popular microblogging services such as Tumblr and Posterous. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a bit of an analysis of the Postrank report, showing that Blogger is the king of comments. But while hosted blog services serve their purpose, if you’re trying to build a brand, you want to host your own blog, using WordPress, Drupal, Moveable Type, Joomla, Expression Engine, etc.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has published a report (PDF, 19 pages) on their findings of a experiment to study browser signatures. It appears that even if you have cookies turned off, 8 in 10 browsers still leave a unique, trackable signature, like a fingerprint, that could be used to track your surfing — especially if you have Adobe Flash or Java plugins installed. That doesn’t necessarily mean the government is watching you, but rather that it would be a boon to marketers. Of course, there’s an inherent violation of privacy if your browser is ratting you out. On a related note, even the speed and rhythm with which you type in a site’s password could give you away.

Understanding Social Media Traffic

Online communities have been around since the dawn of the Internet, even before the World Wide Web made its appearance. People have used computer to computer communications for the same reason they’d use a telephone or, prior to that, the postal service – to interact with each other across distance. Today, what appears to be an emerging market, social media, is actually not new at all. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Digg, Twitter and others are all actually evolutions of the founding ideas that the Web was based upon. We’re just beginning to get good at connecting people with each other and only now are business people realizing the untapped potential of interacting with their customers on the more personal level that social media provides.

If you run any kind of business venture online you definitely need to have a social media presence. One of the big ways to gain traffic these days is through social bookmarking services. These include sites like Digg where users submit links or stories. Those submissions are then voted on by other Digg members.

The higher the number of votes, the higher that article or site rises in within the Digg ranking system. Links that Digg members love can get massive traffic sent to that particular site so pleasing Digg users is definitely a good thing! But be careful, because there is also a phenomenon known as “the Digg effect” where a site will take so much traffic that it actually crashes. That’s not hard to imagine when you realize Digg gets over 236 million visitors annually.

Reddit is another social bookmarking site that focuses on news, rewarding users who submit particularly popular links with karma points. A site called del.ico.us takes an approach that encourages people to comment on each others links and build a strong sense of community. With this site, a wiki adds a more collective slant to the offerings and it’s become a real source for viral Internet memes and other popular Web items. These are only a handful of the social bookmarking sites available to those who want to dive into the social media sea of opportunities.

The thing you need to remember is that with social media sites, the key word is social. You do not want to leap into these communities and start flinging your links and promotions around. You need to keep in mind that like any community, and social media sites are very much communities, there are those who are obnoxious individuals and there are those who add value. To gain a true level of popularity, you need to add value. Find out what’s hot and offer bookmarks that others in the community will love. Leave valuable comments and feedback for other users. Make friends and use the social angle to your advantage by creating a positive reputation for yourself and your business activities. For those who match their business acumen with polite, constructive social interaction, there are no limits to the success that these social media sites can bring you.

If you find yourself confused, do what you’d be advised to do in an unfamiliar situation offline. That’s right, ask others around you for help. Learn all that you can about each community that you participate in and show that you care about more than simply the next visitor or sale. Positive word of mouth is what you want from social media, you want people to spread your links based on their own desires rather than because you harassed them into it. Pay attention to emotional cues that people give off in online communication and if you sense people are becoming annoyed, immediately back off and try something else or even apologize. You need all the help you can get to keep your site attractive to visitors and the more popular folks in the social media scene can either help or hurt your reputation and the traffic that goes with that reputation.

It’s not that difficult to succeed when it comes to social media and using social bookmarking sites. By letting common sense, fair play and the same politeness you learned in grade school be your guide, you’ll find that it’s an easy, efficient and productive way to do business on the web. And you might just have a lot more fun than you bargained for finding your way towards the success you’ve been wishing for.