The Inquisitr » digg

Digg’s promotion algorithm revealed

Kim LaCapria — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:00:05 +0000

In case you were wondering how it works, here’s a handy flowchart explaining the process.

Digg’s new social advertising platform prices ads based on popularity

Kim LaCapria — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:08:48 +0000

If you’ve got a Facebook account, you may have noticed the option to like/unlike ads on your profile. Digg unveiled a plan today to take this concept a step further- charging less for ads voted up by Digg users.

With the new system, popular ads will get a lower cost per click rate while ads with more “buries” will be more expensive and likely pulled more quickly by media buyers. The new Digg Ads will appear within the content stream, marked as sponsored but otherwise mimicking regular Digg content.

Digg users are notoriously fickle, and speculation abounds as to how the community will react to the new ad model. (Such as mass burying all ads.) To gauge community and advertiser feedback, Digg plans to roll the system out slowly, starting with ~~geek~~ Digg-friendly sponsors Intel and EA.

Why you shouldn’t be concerned about the DiggBar

Duncan Riley — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 05:05:15 +0000

A little over a week since launching, the DiggBar feature from Digg continues to be the focus of widespread condemnation.

In case you’ve missed the noise, the DiggBar places a Digg specific frame around sites, and is bundled with Digg now linking to short URL’s as opposed to sites directly. The arguments against it range from bad web practices, through to stealing SEO and destroying the end user experience.

Some of the principles argued by opponents are reasonable ones, but most people shouldn’t be really that concerned. Why? it all comes down to numbers.

Distribution

Most site owners would be appreciative of getting on the front page of Digg once. We’ve managed it maybe half a dozen times since launching last May. The reality with Digg has always been that there is an uneven distribution between favored sites and the rest of the web.

Richard MacManus in Read Write Web

Digg users also have their favored blogs and websites, which get a disproportionate amount of attention than other less fortunate sites…. A lot of times, the favored sites get dugg very very quickly by digg users. The main problem with that is that the original source for a story often gets overlooked – and the popular site garners all the diggs instead.

Search Engine War has a chart from 2008 showing the distribution here. I did a quick crunch of their stats: for their sample period, 25 sites accounted for 31.98% of front page stories. It should be noted that the 25th site on the list accounted for 0.5% alone, so although the distribution tappers off towards the end of the list, you could easily get to 40-50% out to the top 100 sites.

A small number of sites dominate the top stories on Digg. So to what degree outside of those sites is the DiggBar really the end of the world?

It isn’t.

If Digg wants to send this site a pile of traffic on occasion and put a bar up top, I’ve got no major issues at all. Would I prefer they did it without the DiggBar? yes, but I’ll happily take that traffic none the less. I also don’t have to bet that others would happy accept the traffic, I know that they would (and I did ask some before writing this post.)

If you don’t like it….

Although offering the DiggBar as standard on links, Digg isn’t forcing sites to accept the bar. The code to get rid of it is actually remarkably simple. Engadget for example is blocking the DiggBar (an excellent post here) as are a number of other sites. So if you really, really hate it that much, add the code.

Conclusion

I do sympathize with the principles expressed by opponents of the DiggBar, but for most people it shouldn’t be an issue, nor is it. If you’re fortunate enough to get on the front page of Digg, does it really matter that much if you’re not a top 100 site if there’s a bar on top, a bar which it should be noted can be used to Digg your site even more? I won’t be blocking the DiggBar, and nor will most people.

Digg copies StumbleUpon, Reddit with the DiggBar

Duncan Riley — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:32:22 +0000

Proving once more that the best ideas are often stolen, Digg has launched the DiggBar, an iframed toolbar that offers a range of features.

At its core, the DiggBar is naturally a voting platform for Digg. Users can Digg a site while on the site via the frame, and if the page is not already in the system, use the DiggBar to submit it. Along side the service is a handy URL shortening feature that is used by adding digg.com in front of any URL in a browser. Socially, the DiggBar supports related content and “random” content, so you can navigate through items that have previously been featured by Digg.

If those things all sound familiar, they should, because URL shortening aside, it’s a dead copy of what’s already being offered by StumbleUpon (who now offers a similar iFrame toolbar) and Reddit (via the Socialite plugin). Some sites have gushed over the DiggBar, using superlatives such as “amazing” and “incredible;” yes, the implementation is solid, but the idea is none of those things. Forgive me that unlike others I’m not interested in dropping my head into the crotch of Kevin Rose with my mouth wide opened.

What is interesting though is that Rose and company have decided to take on StumbleUpon with the move, although admittedly it’s not in the same league yet (no category surfing for example). There’s talk of ads appearing in the DiggBar, but it should be remembered how StumbleUpon makes money: by selling page views that are added when users are stumbling. It’s a solid business model, and from experience, a great way to advertise a site. Here’s betting that Digg wants a slice of this action as well.

Reddit wins the April Fools Day pranks

Duncan Riley — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:42:00 +0000

Number two player in the social voting space Reddit has won by a clear mile in the April Fools Day prank competition by rebranding the site as Reddigg.

The skin includes the choice to Digg an entry, or bury it, vs the usual vote up or down on Reddit. Unlike Digg, Reddit offers a transparent voting system; the inclusion of a bury button up front is pure mokery.

A close second is Google, who worked off the theme of the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, with sub pranks outside of the original prank.

Kevin Rose launches WeFollow: a Twitter user directory

Duncan Riley — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:16:51 +0000

Digg founder Kevin Rose has entered the Twitter services game with a new Twitter user directory WeFollow.

WeFollow is remarkably simple, and that’s where its strength lies. The site indexes users based on user submitted interests via hash tag. For example, the front page offers the top users in categories such as news, music and more based on the hash tags submitted by the user themselves. Users can nominate three hash tags, and are automatically added to the index.

The site works both as a ranking and discovery service. Users are ranked by their number of followers under each tag. Visitors can then visit lists and discover users that share their interests.

The only criticism of the site is that it mainly serves to promote the A-List on Twitter, because to rank on the front page, or first page of most tags, you need to have a lot of followers to begin with. So far though, it’s not impossible to rank, although this will change as more and more add themselves to the site. For example, at the time of writing I managed to pop up at 19 on the tag web, but this is bound to change.

To list yourself on WeFollow, send a message on Twitter as follows: @wefollow #tag #tag #tag, placing your preferred tags where #tag is listed.

Digg Takes a Hit in Widget-Based Sharing

JR — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:55:48 +0000

Note: Three days after the publication of this story, ShareThis informed us that its staff made an error in the data that it shared with us.

While the January 2009 percentages were correct, ShareThis analysts seemingly misplaced a decimal point while calculating the change in usage in some of the services since August 2008. In actuality, Digg’s drop in widget-based sharing was only 0.92 percent, rather than 9.18 percent, and Twitter’s gain was actually 0.04 percent rather than 0.40 percent, as initially reported. Additionally, AIM’s gain was 0.03 percent as opposed to 0.28 percent.

We apologize for having passed the incorrect information on to you. The story, in its original form, follows.

Digg is seeing a significant drop in shared content when it comes to submissions made via a popular third-party platform.

ShareThis, the Web publishing utility that lets users submit pages to multiple social bookmarking sites from a single interface, is planning to release some new metrics next week. The measurements show which sharing services are most frequently used by surfers.

Here are the results for January of 2009:

Digg, you’ll notice, is now down to a tiny sliver — just 2.10 percent of all the ShareThis submissions for this past January. That’s a drop of just over 9 percent from half a year earlier. E-mail sharing, while still by far the largest chunk of the pie, has dropped about 7 percent since August. MySpace, StumbleUpon, and Technorati saw small decreases as well.

When it comes to increases, Facebook is seeing the biggest gains within ShareThis, jumping up nearly 13 percent to a total of 21.20 percent of all the platform’s submissions. Twitter and AIM also saw minor increases.

It was just last month, you may remember, that data from Hitwise indicated Twitter had overtaken Digg in overall traffic for the first time. The new measurements from ShareThis may contribute to the argument of a broad shift slowly taking place in social bookmarking preferences. They may also, of course, simply indicate that more Digg users are sharing content directly via digg.com rather than through a publisher’s sharing platform.

About 80,000 online publishers have the ShareThis platform installed on their sites.

Digg

Twitter

ShareThis

Why is MC Hammer Suddenly All Over Social Media?

JR — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:00:24 +0000

Here I thought MC Hammer was limited to VH1 reality-style shows these days — but apparently, the 90s rapper-turned-preacher is a rising star of social media. Am I the only one who’s perplexed?

First, Hammer popped up at this week’s Twitter-oriented “Shorty Awards,” and he didn’t go unnoticed, either. Listed as a “special appearance” and billed right under Shaq and CNN’s Rick Sanchez, Hammer ended up stealing a good bit of the spotlight from the highly covered event.

The guy’s got 60,000 followers on his Twitter account. And now, the Hammerman is popping up in a spoof video said to show the secrets behind Digg’s mysterious algorithms:

All right, so let me just ask: When did it become Hammertime again? And, for the love of Vanilla Ice, can we at least get some parachute pants on that guy if he’s going to be dancing all around the Web 2.0 world?

Catching Village Voice Media with its hands in the Digg cookie jar

Steven Hodson — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:11:00 +0000

Now I am pretty sure that we all know who Digg.com is; and if not that is one hellva rock you’ve been hiding under, but Village Voice Media is probably not quite as well known. Well it so happens to be a media company who among other metropolitan newsweeklies owns the venerable Village Voice newspaper. It appears as well to be; or at least some of its employees seem to be behind a very active campaign to game Digg.com.

This is according to Ed Kohler of The Deets blog, who has done some pretty interesting investigation recently about the connection between CityPages.com, Village Voice Media and one City Pages; which is owned by Village Voice Media, web editor named Jen Boyles. the connection Ed makes that since the day that Jen joined Digg and began heavily promoting CityPages stories another very regular Digg user by the name of IvanB also began promoting CityPages stories. Interestingly enough is the fact that the friends of Jen Boyles happen to live in cities where Village Voice Media also has news properties.

As Ed points out using this graph it seems that IvanB; the influential digger, as a real affinity for CityPages stories

and apparently IvanB isn’t the only influential Digger to be doing the same thing. Ed suggests as well that one of the other heavy diggers of CityPages stories is nothing like their Digg profile portrays them to be. In fact instead of being a woman they are a man who works for Village Voice Media

Just for fun, I’m going state the obvious: The Digg user Philostrato is NOT a she, but a he (pictured on the right here and left here). Philostrato is a he by the name of Keith Plocek, whose work titles are:

* Social Media Manager at Village Voice Media
* Web Editor at Houston Press

Exactly the kind of roles a person would have who obsesses over Village Voice Media’s web traffic.

While there is no absolute proof that what Ed Kohler is suggesting in his post it sure does make for some interesting reading and I am sure will reaffirm a general consensus that Digg is and always will be gamed for the benefit of advertising dollars.

[hat tip to Susan Mernit]

Twitter Overtakes Digg In Traffic

JR — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:44:07 +0000

For the first time, Twitter has now overtaken Digg in U.S.-based traffic.

Twitter climbed to the #84 spot in market share last week while Digg landed at #85, according to new data just released by Hitwise. The data analysis company credits the heavy Twitter traffic related to the U.S. Airways crash into the Hudson River for helping bring the site over the edge. Twitter’s success is likely even larger than it appears here, too, as these figures do not take into account Twitter usage originating from cell phones.

Twitter is also rapidly growing in the 25-34 age range, with 45 percent of its traffic now coming from that group. Only 12 percent of Twitter’s traffic was within the 25-34 group one year ago. Digg, in comparison, currently has 20 percent of its users in that range.

Another interesting note: While Digg’s traffic comes largely from Google, Twitter’s comes largely from social networks.

Not too shabby, eh?

Twitter

Digg

MixedInk: Wiki Meets Digg

Duncan Riley — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:35:04 +0000

MixedInk is a new collaborative wiki service with a strong dose of social voting, or as the company suggests: Wiki meets Digg. MixedInk aims to help users overcome the noise created by multiple contributions by adding a voting element to each user generated contribution.

The base of MixedInk, like any Wiki is a topic; an organizer proposes a topic and invites people to participate. Participants contribute ideas and opinions addressing the issue. They also edit and remix other people’s submissions. While this is going on, users can also rate other submissions, creating a social preference that allows the best contributions to rise to the top.

Demo video below. It’s an interesting idea, but it feels a little busy. On one hand you’ve got your Wiki elements, but users can edit other contributions before and during voting, so it wouldn’t be difficult for example to edit a higher ranking contribution to make it worse, or having done that using it as your own. Still, maybe it won’t be gamed, and it is different as an idea. One to watch.

Check out Slate’s Inauguration Speech wiki for an example of how it works here.

Digg Will Address Duplicate Entries. Sadly Tools Not Included, But Top Submitters Are.

Duncan Riley — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:26:54 +0000

Digg has advised that their popular social voting site will be addressing duplicate entries and other issues.

Anton Kast, head of R&D for Digg said in a post to the Digg blog:

Duplicate submissions have been an ongoing issue, and we are working on several new tools that will help address this. Improvements in duplication detection are underway and expected soon. We’re also working on a new system that will, among other things, allow us to track users who abusively submit duplicate content. While we haven’t fully hammered out all the details, the tool will likely include warnings and limits on duplicate submissions.

Sadly, Digg won’t be getting rid of tools, sorry Digg members who do nothing more than down vote other members. No, apparently those participate too much need fixing:

Another area of recent community debate has focused on home page diversity, and the concentration of certain popular submitters. Our goal is to give each person a fair chance at getting his or her submission promoted to the home page. Digg’s promotional algorithm aims to ensure that the most popular content Dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page. Since Digg began over four years ago, we’ve been making ongoing tweaks to the promotional algorithm. We spend a lot of time analyzing the data and improving the system. While most of these changes go unnoticed, we will be testing different approaches to increase submitter diversity in the upcoming months.

I’m divided on the last point; on one hand, I know a couple of the top guys and know they are good value, but likewise we don’t get a good run on Digg, so opening it up some more might help us.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

Get Your Digg On Via Twitter

JR — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:27:29 +0000

Digg has launched a series of new Twitter feeds to let you keep up with hot topics right inside your stream.

Once you add a feed, you’ll see it post every time a new story becomes popular within that subject. The system is built on the Twitter API.

The full list of Digg’s Twitter feeds follows. And did you see the first-ever “State of the Twittersphere” report for 2008’s fourth quarter? The study found 70 percent of Twitter users signed up in ‘08, with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts popping up daily. You can check out the full findings here (PDF).

Digg’s New Twitter Feeds

• Digg Homepage updates as every new story is promoted
• Digg 2000 : Stories that reach 2,000 or more Diggs
• Technology: Popular stories from Digg.com/technology
• Apple: Popular stories from Digg.com/apple
• Software: Popular stories from Digg.com/software
• World & Business: Popular stories from Digg.com/world_business
• Political News: Popular stories from Digg.com/politics
• Science: Popular stories from Digg.com/science
• Environment: Popular stories from Digg.com/environment
• Offbeat: Popular stories from Digg.com/offbeat
• Gaming: Popular stories from Digg.com/gaming
• Images: Popular images from Digg.com/images
• Video: Popular videos from Digg.com/video
• Entertainment: Popular stories from Digg.com/entertainment
• Sports: Popular stories from Digg.com/sports

Digg

Twitter

USA Today Claiming Copyright over Digg Demonstration Video

Duncan Riley — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 04:12:26 +0000

In September 2007 I uploaded a demonstration video of new features at Digg to YouTube; at the time the video appeared on the Digg blog and couldn’t be embedded, and we wanted it for the story. I can’t recall whether Digg pitched the story to me (or the site I was writing for at the time) or we simply picked the story up off the Digg blog, but either way we gave publicity to Digg at a time they wanted it, and they’ve never once objected.

So imagine my surprise to find that USA Today has claimed copyright over the video!

The very generous USA Today (a unit of Gannett) is allowing me to keep the video up, but now has full access to all stats from the video and gets to serve ads against it.

Now unless Digg has been acquired by Gannett, I’m stating the obvious here that this is a grade A joke. Whether the fault lies with YouTube’s content identification program, or with USA Today itself is a moot point: the content is an original video from Digg, voiced over by Digg staff, consisting of nothing more than pictures of features on Digg! If it is subject to a proper DMCA notice from USA Today, it would also constitute a false declaration under law as well.

Here’s the email from YouTube, and the video follows.

Dear nichenet,

Your video “New Digg demo” has been identified by YouTube’s Content Identification programme as containing copyrighted content which USA Today claims is theirs.

Your video “New Digg demo” is still available because USA Today does not object to this content appearing on YouTube at this time. As long as USA Today has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page.

Claim Details:

Copyright owner: USA Today
Content claimed: Some or all of the visual content
Policy: Allow this content to remain on YouTube.

Place advertisements on this video’s watch page.

Applies to these locations:
Everywhere
USA Today claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification programme. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video/audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorised to use the content at issue, you can dispute this claim with USA Today and view other options in the Video-ID Matches section of your YouTube account. Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes between content owners. Learn more about video-identification disputes.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team

Why “Social” Works

Rob Diana — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:43:44 +0000

In the past few years, we have seen the explosion of “social”. Obviously, lots of people ask why. I feel that a lot of it boils down to simple human nature. People are social beings, regardless of their tendency towards introversion or extroversion. Introverts are social, just on a smaller scale, maybe even just one-on-one interactions. Everyone knows that extroverts are social, because everyone talks to them at some point during a party. On the internet, “social” is a little different. “Social” means the connections you make with friends and acquaintances on various sites on the internet. These sites could be social news like Digg, Mixx, etc. It could also be a social network like Facebook orLinkedIn. There are also lifestreaming and aggregation sites to combine your activity into one location.

Why has there been this explosion of all things social? Because social works. Obviously, this is a little light on detail, but that is also the reason I am writing a series of posts on the success of “social”. There are various reasons why social works, and social works for different reasons on different types of sites. What works for a social news site may not work for a social lifestreaming site.

Kevin Rose not quite so popular with the ladies today

Duncan Riley — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:19:30 +0000

Digg and Revision 3’s Kevin Rose is in a spot of bother after suggesting women should have their nipples cut with scissors in an episode of DiggNation.

The offending part is at the 4:17 minute mark in the DiggNation episode below, but if you can’t sit through it to that point, here’s what Rose said

“there is only one time you can strike [a woman -] if she kicks you in the balls, you have the ability and the right, to punch her in the teat – it’s just like that – it’s kinda like tit for tat [Albrecht talks then Kevin again] It hurts them, it does too – or take a scissors to the teat” (Kevin makes cutting action with hand)

Some people are upset with the entire comment thread, but I’d tend to side with ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick: where Rose really crosses the line is the inclusion of scissors.

Rose has issued an apology for the comments:

“I’d like to apologize for some comments I made in the latest episode of Diggnation, which came off as insensitive on the topic of violence towards women. Alex and I have always viewed Diggnation as an outlet to push the limits in a comedic fashion. Obviously, violence against women is serious and something we don’t advocate in any way.”

It was obviously a joke gone to far, but it won’t win Rose friends.

Update: as pointed out by Muhammad Saleem on Twitter, Rose banned 25-30 Digg users for “sexist” comments far less than this. Hypocrisy 101. Maybe Rose needs to apologize to them as well.

No related posts.

Why Muhammed Saleem’s Tip’d will succeed

Duncan Riley — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:20:34 +0000

Well known social media consultant Muhammed Saleem has launched Tip’d, a Digg style social voting site for financial news.

The SocialWebCMS powered site offers a front page stream of popular news, and category based browsing, including Stocks, Economy and Real Estate.

Other sites are focusing on the Digg angle, both with the site itself, and Saleem’s status as a top Digg user. To some extent that’s fair, and I understand why those connections are being made. But while Saleem may be best known as a top Digg user, he’s also a social media consultant.

I’ve never met Muhammed in person, but I’ve corresponded with him in the past (I also missed the email he sent me a few days ago with a heads up on this), and I’ve even been on his podcast. I’ve followed him closely over the years, and on occasion, our paths have crossed on various sites.

Here’s the thing: he might be one of Digg’s top users, but I don’t see him that way. Muhammed is one of the best social media consultants on the planet, and that’s a label I don’t hand out easily. He knows social media not only by name, but by living it. He has a wealth of knowledge and understanding in this space that very few people could match.That’s why I think Tip’d is going to be successful. It’s admittedly niche, but as reported elsewhere, the startup costs are low (below $25,000), so the barrier for making this site work is low also. If anyone could pull off a successful Digg style social voting site in a space so full with clones we gave up long ago counting and tracking them, Muhammed can.

StumbleUpon to relaunch, drops the need for a plugin

Duncan Riley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:08:15 +0000

The eBay owned website discovery service StumbleUpon (well eBay owned for now, if the rumors of the site being on the market are true) is set to relaunch with a major overhaul that removes the need for users to install the StumbleUpon browser plugin.

According to MG Siegler at VentureBeat, the new StumbleUpon will be rolled out in the coming weeks, with some users gaining access to the new version starting from now. The plug-in free StumbleUpon will utilize what MG calls “clever JavaScript code” to show a bar at the top of the screen, giving users a similar experience without the plug-in, although I’d note it looks suspiciously like an old fashioned iFrame to me.

StumbleUpon has been fairly popular, attracting some 6 million users since first launching in 2002. However, their reliance on a browser plugin is a natural growth inhibitor; some people simply won’t install a plug-in, particularly one as obtrusive as StumbleUpon offers, others simply don’t have access, with StumbleUpon offering plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox only. The new StumbleUpon caters to both registered users and casual visitors; anyone visiting StumbleUpon will be able to surf their range of sites on any browser without a plugin, and that’s got to help bring new users through the door.

StumbleUpon isn’t abandoning their browser plugin, despite the changes. It’s hoped that the new offering opens StumbleUpon to new users, but old users won’t miss out.

Social voting

StumbleUpon is also moving more into the social voting space through a new program called StumbleThru. Initial site partners include The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, National Geographic and HowStuffWorks. It looks like a social voting widget ala Digg or Reddit buttons, and site visitors are able to vote for content via the widget. Users will either then be taken to the formal voting page on StumbleUpon, or to another site in the StumbleUpon network of recommended sites. According to VentureBeat, StumbleUpon is limiting this program to “quality sites” to avoid gaming of the system, so it’s limited on wider use.

Conclusion

I like StumbleUpon. I like it as both a user, and an advertiser. When we launched The Inquisitr, we had a small advertising budget, and I tried a number of sites, and one I kept going back to was StumbleUpon. The traffic was real, and it helped us in exposing the site to new visitors, and every time I renewed the ad spend, I could measure the success not only in traffic (you may pay for 500 page views, but if you get enough positive votes you end up getting a lot more), but in RSS subscriptions as well. As much as I haven’t used it now for some time, I’m happy to recommend it to others.

These changes are both an obvious and logical step forward for StumbleUpon. The site has been losing traffic, at least according to Compete, Quantcast and Alexa, and they need to do something new to increase page views, particularly at a time they may well be on the market. This is the right move, and it can certainly do no harm.

(image credit: VentureBeat)

StumbleUpon

No related posts.

Kwoff asks the question: can Australia sustain its own Digg-like site?

Duncan Riley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:28:04 +0000

Kwoff is an Australian social voting site that asks the question: can Australia sustain its own Digg-like social voting site.

Kwoff launched this time last year, and comes with some strong local baking. Run by Sydney based Dan Walsh, the site includes on its founders list Stephen Mayne, a near luddite on Web 2.0 but the founder of Australia’s most popular subsciption email service Crikey (and yes, I pay to receive it), and former staffer turned writer Greg Barns, who more recently suggested that Facebook and other Web 2.0 services should be policed by a team of censors and all content moderated because OMG people might be defamed. OK, so maybe they aren’t the cream of the Australian Web 2.0 crop, but Mayne, who I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting once, is a smart operator who is a champion for independent media in this country, Barns well….well….lets just say he makes Andrew Keen look like a saint, and anything else I’d care to say would be the target of his censorship wand…or a pack of lawyers.

Kwoff got off to a low key start, but has slowly built a respectable audience. Alexa gives the site a ranking of 73,361, and for Australian sites 1446. It’s surprisingly popular in India and Pakistan as well. Of late, Kwoff has had a welcomed boost through inclusion of the add to Kwoff button on news.com.au properties (news.com.au being the local mega site for News Corp papers), and one Fairfax newspaper, which has helped boost awareness. As of today, we’ve added a Kwoff button here on The Inquisitr as well; although we aren’t an “Australian site” in a strict sense (and less than 10% of our traffic comes from Australia) this site is Australian owned, and I’m happy to support a local startup in this space.

I’ve met Dan Walsh a couple of times at events, and although I didn’t follow him up for this post (I’m time poor at the moment, but we might do an interview in the future), the one thing that has always struck me each time we’ve met is his passion for Kwoff, and his broader knowledge of the social voting space. As long as he ignores calls from Barns, I’m convinced that his drive, and knowledge, bides Kwoff well.

But can Kwoff succeed in a space dominated by US sites, with some such as Reddit offering Australian specific pages? It’s a hard ask, but with support from the broader Australian old and new media community, it’s looking good. Voting and submissions on the site are active, with top stories receiving 20 or more votes: not huge perhaps, but it wasn’t that long ago when stories hit the front page of Digg with 60 votes. My only real criticism of the site is one of aesthetics: it’s as ugly as sin. While content plays should always put content first, social voting sites need to offer a visually pleasing experience to compliment the participatory side.

We’ll keep an eye on Kwoff in the future, and check back in with anything new if it solves our opening question. Of course, if you’re a Kwoff user already, feel free to submit this to Kwoff or vote on this post

Digg funding raises questions

Duncan Riley — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:27:17 +0000

As we reported earlier, Digg has raised a Series C round of $28.7 million. The official line on the funding is that the money will be used for international expansion, new staff and a new office.

Om Malik reports a whisper that Kevin Rose cashed out some of his shares in the round, a trend among startups lately taking extra money, which might explain some of the money. Tek Populi takes the piss with “VC’s Are Livid With Digg: Wanted Cash For Digg BlackMarket, Not More Bongs and Beer,” and although it’s tongue in cheek, there are questions raised that should be asked.

Exactly what’s going on with Digg at the moment? $28.7 million for internationalization and some extra features? seriously? After $11.3 million in funding to date, a lucrative ad deal with Microsoft, and 224 million page views a month, they couldn’t expand without taking more money?

Negotiations with Google for a $200 million acquisition were allegedly terminated in July when Google walked away after completing due-diligence, raising questions then about Digg, and now 2 months later the company needs a big round to grow the company on a path that for most firms would be the natural budgeted direction.

At best I can only guess, but I’ll take a couple of stabs: 1: Digg is bleeding money or is only marginally profitable. How I don’t know, but foreign expansion and new staff hires would have been affordable if Digg was making money, and/ or 2. Kevin Rose threatened to walk, and the only way to keep him at Digg was to raise a new round and let him cash some of his shares. This point makes sense when you consider how many times Digg was suppose to be in negotiations for a sale, and that Rose has interests in other startups (Revision3/ Pownce), so you’d presume that he’s been looking at getting out for some time.

Let me say though that I like Rose, I like the company, and I’m not trying to hate on Digg here. However, I also don’t buy the spin. Either Digg’s not performing financially, and/ or Rose threatened to walk.