Webware

Social news site Digg is experimenting with a new way to give upcoming stories a chance at the limelight with an experiment the company is calling Digg Trends.

Stories that begin to experience a heightened amount of user interest in the form of off-site sharing, user discussion, and of course Diggs, will be presented up at the very top of Digg's home page, as well as being spouted in a special RSS and Twitter news feed. Once at the top of the page, those stories have 10 minutes to get voted onto the front page as a normally dugg story, otherwise they're buried into Digg's dead pool. All the while a giant counter ticks down how much time the story has left.

Along with the countdown timer, Digg is also putting forward some of its outgoing traffic numbers. Users can see how many clicks a trending story has gotten from the front page. Normally, the only other traffic numbers you see on a Digg story is when you're on the source site itself, though users must have the DiggBar enabled.

Trending stories get just 10 minutes to prove their worth like any other front-page story. The company is also making available how many users have clicked to view the source content.

(Credit: Digg)

This new system is a stark difference from the somewhat nebulous promotion algorithm that exists for regular stories. Under the current system, stories have to earn their way onto the front page which involves standing out among an ever-growing pool of other upcoming stories. The company made this process a little more custom-tailored with the introduction of its recommendation engine, but it still requires that users actively visit that part of the site to see what's new. The new trending idea puts some of those stories up for everyone--and right on the front page.

In a company blog post about the new process, Digg's senior software engineer Kurt Wilms called it an "experiment," and said that it could change based on user feedback. Some Digg users have already voiced their opinions in the posting's comment section, citing that "bury brigades" (groups of highly opinionated users) could keep some stories from ever making it past their 10-minute window. The end result being that a story that could have legitimately made the front page on its own gets shut down before ever having a chance under the normal algorithm.

As with other new features, Digg seems to be rolling out Trends slowly, and to a small group of users. I'd expect it to show up for everyone in the next day or two.

Spot the Facebook sharing button on Cracked.com

(Credit: Facebook/Cracked)

Web publishers and blog owners have a new toy to play with: Facebook announced Monday that it has launched new "share" buttons with counters, much in the manner of Digg's iconic buttons and the third-party TweetMeme app for Twitter sharing.

Plus, there's more: Publishers installing Facebook share buttons can also get data back related to how many times that link has been shared, how many users have hit the thumbs-up "like" button or commented on shared versions of the story on Facebook, and how many people have clicked back to it through Facebook.

These Facebook "share" buttons had existed before, and the company said that more than 2 billion pieces of content are shared per week. But this is the first time that the counter and analytics have been available.

A post on the Facebook developer blog explains: "Anyone can add the Share button to their website with little to no technical experience, and style the button from a variety of options." Accessing the analytics however, requires a bit more coding know-how.

This could spell bad news for Digg, as Facebook's significantly bigger and more mainstream audience could make it a far more appealing choice for site owners that would prefer to display one prominent sharing button rather than two. As for Twitter, it doesn't actually own the app that powers the "retweet" buttons. A move like this from Facebook, however, could push it to think a bit harder about a partnership or acquisition--or hasten progress on that "retweet API" it has in the works.

Related speculation: When are we going to see a "most-shared" ranking from Facebook? That's when Digg's execs would really have to start sweating.

(Credit: Crave UK)

A Digg application for the iPhone is in the works, two years after Apple announced its own version. Kevin Rose, co-founder of the popular social-bookmarking and Web aggregation site, was spotted playing with the app in London.

Rose was attending the Future of Web Apps conference, where he hung out with our own Nate Lanxon and Natali Del Conte. Arnt Eriksen and Thomas Moen of Norwegian videocast Sofaprat clocked Rose playing with a trial version of the app on his iPhone.

Rose was unforthcoming about the functionality of the app, chuckling, "You're not even supposed to know about that." A quick way of submitting links to Digg would be useful, but we wonder how you'd move from the Safari browser to the Digg app, as Apple locks out apps from running in the background. It seems likely the app will have a built-in mini-browser, allowing you to view submitted content, then vote stories up or down, known as digging or burying.

A Digg iPhone app was announced in Apple's app news in 2007. This mobile version of the site includes iPhone scrolling, mini-permalink pages with the top five comments, and digging ability. Rose claimed then that the mobile site was coded in 48 hours, so who knows what kind of features they could have come up with in two years?

(Source: Crave UK)

With the help of plug-ins, you can extend the functionality of your Wordpress blog far beyond what's available to you when you add it to your server.

One of the best ways to get the most out of your blogs is through social plug-ins. These simple plug-ins can be added to your blog to help you connect socially with both your readers and their friends. They offer a fine way to build traffic to your site.

Go social with your blog

Add to Facebook If you want to make it easy for readers to syndicate your content to Facebook, Add to Facebook is the plug-in for you.

The plug-in provides a simple option at the bottom of each post, called "Share on Facebook." When the reader clicks on that link, they're immediately delivered to their Facebook page, showing a thumbnail of the image in your blog post, as well as the beginning of your post. If Facebook followers click on that link, they'll be delivered to your page. It's a neat utility. And it's a great way to share content through social channels.

Add to Facebook makes it easy for readers to syndicate your content.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Digg Digg Although its name might suggest that Digg Digg is a way to get readers to share your content with the popular social news site, it's much more than that.

Digg Digg allows you to add voting buttons to your blog. You can add a TweetMeme retweet button, a Yahoo Buzz button, and a "Submit to Reddit" option, along with your Digg button. The plug-in also allows you to decide where to place those buttons. You can choose the top, bottom, left, or right of your post.

Digg Digg is a great way to syndicate your content around the Web.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Digg's new advertising system, the one that changes how much advertisers have to pay based on how popular their ads are, is going live in the next few days. A new company blog post says that the new system will be very limited in its scale, both in how many advertisers are a part of the pilot program, and how many ads are being placed around the site. So much so that "many (users) will not see them."

If all goes according to plan, these new ads could one day take the place of Digg's existing and traditional advertising, which uses ads that are sold at a fixed price. The newer system relies on user interaction to adjust the price according to how many up or down votes an ad has. The more people like the ad, the less the advertiser has to pay, with the lame ones having a limited run and a higher cost.

When I first heard about this system I was skeptical, since the ads looked and acted so much like existing on-page Digg content. But at the same time, it means that advertisers are going to have to work much, much harder to get user attention in a way that's tailored to the audience. For Digg users this means they get control not only of the stories that are hitting the front page, but also the ads that appear on it.

Here's what it will look like:

The new Digg ads can be dugg or buried by users, and affect how much the advertisers have to pay.

(Credit: Digg / CNET)

After two days of silence, Digg has gone on the record to officially acknowledge the change in how its shortened links are redirected, as well as clear up how links will be handled in the future.

The change, which took place on Sunday, had links which once lead directly to a story's source, redirecting to Digg's story pages instead. The new behavior appeared only on stories that had been submitted to the site, leading to confusion on where users would go when they clicked on a shortened Digg URL.

In a post on Digg's company blog, CEO Jay Adelson explained that the new way of handling shortened URLs would remain in place. As a concession to early adopters, Digg URLs created before Tuesday would continue to link directly to the source. But going forward, all new links will retain the newer behavior of redirecting to Digg story pages, unless the page had never been submitted as a story, or the viewer is registered and logged in to Digg.com.

Despite how the the DiggBar and integrated shortening service were introduced to users earlier this year, Adelson said Digg never wanted to end up as a URL service provider.

"Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service," Adelson said. Digg founder Kevin Rose had said something along the same lines in a Sunday night appearance on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech.

So far, the change has resulted in a lot of user distrust. Many people who used the service to shorten URLs have vowed never to use it again, while others simply chided the company for changing the behavior of links without first alerting users. Digg has caved to unhappy users in the past, but this change has more to do with Digg's business model than previous feature changes.

The DiggBar remains one of the company's most controversial features. While fervent users continue to use the service, it was initially a big turnoff for many publishers and casual users. Along with the structure of user comments, the DiggBar has endured a lot of changes since its inception, having had much of its functionality made optional after users and critics alike bashed its operating methods.

Still, the change in URL behavior serves several important purposes in moving Digg forward as a business. One is to get more page views and boost unique user counts from people who must first visit Digg's story pages before visiting the source story. Another is to grow user adoption of the DiggBar, since using it preserves the old way of clicking on links and going directly to the source.

Whether Digg will continue to change its functionality in order to push users toward enabling the DiggBar remains to be seen.

Over the weekend, social news site Digg changed how its links work in a way that gives the site an increase in the number of users who visit.

Users of the site's URL-shortening service noticed that if the Web address they had shortened had been submitted to Digg, the shortened URL would then take its visitors to the story's page on Digg instead of the page it linked to. At least it was this way for users who were not logged into Digg; registered users who had turned off the DiggBar (and who had a recent log-in cookie from Digg) would not see the change in behavior.

The problem

This may seem like a small change, but it's a big knock on Digg's shortening service, and for Digg's credibility at maintaining features.

Introduced in early April, the DiggBar was originally intended as a service that did three things: one was to shorten links and act as a redirection tool. The second was to bring Digg features along for the ride with a framed bar that would appear on the top of the page and provide a simple way to view user comments, related stories, as well as other Dugg items from that same site. The third was to provide a simpler way for users to publish content, either to Digg itself, or places like Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. This included giving users the capability to shorten a URL by dropping a Digg.com/ in front of the site's address.

Despite the bevvy of features compared to some competing URL-shortening services, both users and publishers alike found fault in the DiggBar. Users had problems with the service since it drastically hid information about the site they were on, including the URL in their browser's address bar, and any bookmarks they saved, which would retain the DiggBar. For publishers, there was the worry that users would choose to comment back on Digg instead of on their own pages, as well as SEO damage from search engines not properly indexing and attributing traffic since Digg.com was the redirector.

Digg's solution, which came just two weeks after the DiggBar launch, was to make the whole DiggBar experience something users had to opt-in to see. This meant that registered users of the site would only see shortened Digg URLs, and the DiggBar by choice. Stray visitors of Digg wouldn't see either.

A feature that was once quite controversial, the DiggBar is now a rarity, unless users are registered with Digg and have opted-in to see it on Digg story links.

(Credit: CNET)

In effect this left the DiggBar as something power users could take advantage of, but that casual users would never see--reducing the entire DiggBar feature down to URL shortening.

This clearly wasn't good enough for Digg, since this move nets the site more ad impressions and unique user tracks than it would by acting as a redirection service alone. Back when it was originally introduced, the company was able to get by since the DiggBar displayed ads when people were using certain features such as viewing related content, Digg user comments, and other stories from that site's particular source. But, without the DiggBar on top, and without any kind of recognition--other than in name, Digg was getting none of these benefits.

So is Digg's shortening service now just a way to shorten links to Digg.com pages? Digg founder Kevin Rose went on to say as much in a Sunday night appearance on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, citing that the company was having to internally juggle certain shortened-URLs that had become popular from outside sources. Particularly, ones from Twitter where the source site would be on the receiving end of an increasing amount of traffic, but because of the lack of a Digg frame bar on the top of the page, it wasn't easy for users to... Read More

The social aggregation service Digg got two changes Tuesday that could make the jobs of Web site marketers better.

First, the company is tweaking its submitted story duplicate checker. As before, Digg blocks re-submissions of the exact same URL within a 30-day window. Now it's also got improved algorithms to identify when a duplicate story is submitted, even if it has a different URL. Furthermore, stories on completely different sites that are the same "or similar" now get flagged as potential duplicates.

Digg has been improving duplicate detection for months, and it's important work. Stories flagged separately on Digg that are actually the same can suffer diluted community impact, lower Digg counts overall, and give those stories less exposure than they deserve. Collecting all the appropriate Diggs under a canonical entry helps the good stories surface.

Digg's new site search lets you monitor what Diggers are saying about your stuff.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Speaking of surfacing stories, Digg now has a site search option in its search engine. If you want to see what Diggs your site is generating, just search for the site with a query structure you're already used to from Google: "site:sitename.com." You can sort the results by recency to see the latest Digg activity your site is generating. You can also get these results in an RSS feed, which is a very useful way to monitor what's happening on sites you care about.

If you're responsible for keeping a site in the public eye, these two improvements will make that easier, and easier to track.

Boxee, the open-source software platform that combines Internet media with personal content, announced a slew of updates Tuesday.

Most notably, the company announced that it has made Boxee publicly available to Windows users.

The public alpha version of Boxee for Windows will work with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Users will also be able to run it on Windows Media Center, making it possible to bring Boxee to HDTVs through Microsoft's platform. A beta release of the software should be made available later this year.

MLB comes to Boxee
Boxee has also inked a deal with Major League Baseball that will bring MLB.tv Premium to the platform. According to the company, Boxee users will be able to watch "thousands of baseball games, live and on-demand in HD."

Users will be able to pause and rewind a live game. But in order for them to access those games, they will need to sign up for the MLB.tv Premium service, which costs $89.95 per year or $19.95 per month.

Even more content
Since Digg has a popular video section, it only makes sense that Boxee would sign a deal with the social-news site to bring its videos to the platform.

According to Boxee, users will now be able to watch Digg's most popular videos, as well as upcoming clips. Users will soon be able to Digg videos from within Boxee, but that feature is currently not available.

Boxee also signed on with Tumblr to give that site's users the option to stream music and slideshows to Boxee. The company said more Tumblr features are on the way, but it wouldn't divulge what those are.

As if that's not enough, Boxee also announced that Current TV shows are now available on the platform. Current is home to popular shows, including The Rotten Tomatoes Show, InfoMania, and SuperNews.

New navigation
Since Boxee has made so many content enhancements, the company apparently had to improve its user interface. Boxee now features two new categories: Applications and Local Media. The Applications menu will feature all the Internet content available for the platform. The Local Media menu lists content from the user's computer and local network.