DiggBar, the new shortURL and toolbar service from Digg, has taken the internet community by storm. This is a fantastic utility that travels with you when you click external links from Digg.
The DiggBar, even though small in size, is big in value and comes complete with the ability to digg posts, view total diggs, check out a varied sampling of comments, and see total page views (not just Digg views). The left-hand side of the DiggBar also includes options to favorite content, view more content from the source you’re looking at, and take a glimpse at related or random Digg content in a the dropdown preview window.
The Twitter crowd loves this and services such as twiggit have already implemented this as a short URL for your tweets.
The DiggBar will expose a lot of new people to Digg and will also increase Digg’s overall traffic substantially – unlike other short URL services, Digg doesn’t simply redirect to the longer URL. It keeps you on Digg and shows the site being pointed to in an iframe wrapper. You can get to the underlying URL by clicking on the X button on the top right.
But Digg didn’t stop there. They’re also using DiggBar for all stories on Digg as well. So all those home page stories that send massive amounts of traffic around the web are now redirecting right back to Digg, too. That keeps all that traffic in the Digg ecosystem, to the detriment of the sites being linked to.
Watch this short video from Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) or test it out by typing digg.com/ in front of any page URL.
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twiggit is an automated service that lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg. Every so often the service checks for the last article that you voted for on digg, and updates your twitter status to reflect this. There are a number of options include the ability to only tweet the articles you submit rather than digg, pause the service at anytime, change the frequency of when to check digg and completly remove your twiggit account.
The site can be seen at http://twiggit.org/
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The innovative news aggregator site has the big boys queueing up. Dominic White reports
There aren’t many places in cyberspace where you can find stories about Super Tuesday, CIA interrogations and high-speed photography next to a video of man having a tennis ball fired at his testicles. But Digg.com is one, if the mid-week running order on its homepage was anything to go by.
Digg’s eclectic cocktail of serious politics, tech news, celebrity gossip, conspiracy-theorising bloggers and puerile video has got millions hooked. It is the runaway leader in a wave of web-only news sites that have replaced news editors and sub-editors with the readers themselves, who vote to move stories or clips to the front page of the site, or to bury them.
Digg attracts 24m unique users a month from a demographic dominated by 18-40-year-old tech-savvy males with money to spend. Advertisers are salivating, traditional news companies are looking over their shoulders and Silicon Valley bankers are tipping Digg as one of the big takeover targets of this year.
Last year, Microsoft struck a deal to sell banner adverts on Digg in a three-year agreement which upset some of Digg’s many left-leaning, anti-establishment users.
Some think Digg could be next on Bill Gates’ shopping list after Yahoo! but Digg chief executive Jay Adelson steadfastly refuses to be drawn when probed with questions about potential M&A. “We are growing and we are very happy with the relationship we have established with Microsoft,” says the 37-year-old Californian, whose last job was taking $2.5bn data-centre giant Equinix to market. “We have a fully funded business plan. We don’t require capital in our opinion to reach profitability.”
Digg’s growth story is remarkable even by Web 2.0 standards. It began life in September 2004, the brainchild of web pioneer and cable TV presenter Kevin Rose. Rose, now 30, developed an algorithm that would allow web users to control and promote news and other content on a single site, without external editorial control. Within weeks he realised that, combined with a social-networking element, the site had serious commercial potential He hired a clutch of net veterans, led by Adelson, to help turn Digg into a business.
“Kevin was inspired by small enthusiast news-aggregation sites [for technology types] such as SlashDot and MacRumors,” says Adelson. “But he wanted to take it to the masses.” From the largest online news destinations such as The Wall Street Journal and CNN to the most obscure blog, Digg users can recommend – or “Digg” – their favourite content and provide links to those sites. To stop users rigging Digg, the closely guarded algorithm is constantly updated.
Rose, who started the business with $1,000 of his own money, remains the largest individual shareholder, but he has been backed by a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley investors, including eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; Facebook backer David Sze at Greylock Partners; social-networking pioneer Reid Hoffman and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.
Even with all that financial muscle, Digg remains a low-cost operation, employing just 40 staff. It is spared the massive infrastructure costs of operations such as video-sharing site YouTube, now owned by Google, because Digg merely provides links to other sites.
Ian Maude of industry-watcher Enders Analysis says Digg’s cross between news and social networking sits in a sweet spot on the web. “News is a very good subject to pick because it has a very high appeal,” he says. “Our research shows that 70 per cent of internet users in the UK regularly visit news websites.”
Despite its US base, Adelson says London is Digg’s number one city in terms of “user density”, adding that 7 per cent of all of Digg’s traffic last month came from the UK.
Not surprisingly, Digg’s growing power has caused concern among established news organisations – until recently unused to competing for readers’ attention with content from random individual bloggers.
But Adelson insists Digg has a symbiotic relationship with traditional publications. “It took a good six to 12 months for people to understand, but once they got it they realised we actually drive a tremendous amount of new users to their online publications, so we are helping expand their reach.
“Digg is levelling the playing field but quality still matters: so while we believe it’s important for Digg to allow any author to be exposed, our users recognise that when reporters get paid and have training, it shows.”
Most major news sites – from The Washington Post to CBS to The Daily Telegraph – now feature a Digg button, which readers can click to recommend articles to Digg’s community. These generate more than 1bn page impressions every month, says Adelson.
But Digg’s “wisdom of the masses” approach has backfired before, exposing the tightrope its business model walks between freedom of information and litigation. Last year, under pressure from the owners of the technology behind next-generation DVDs, Digg threatened to take down stories featuring a way to crack their copy protection.
The users staged a rebellion by voting en masse for the stories to stay up. Rose and Adelson reversed their decision, and Rose wrote on Digg’s company blog to explain why. ” You’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell… we died trying.”
Digg didn’t die, and now Adelson and Rose are looking forward to putting a host of new personalisation features on the site. But perhaps the biggest challenge, as Digg gets bigger, is to maintain the backing of the site’s so-far loyal – but sometimes volatile – user community.
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