digg

Are conservatives gaming Digg? Probably, but there are two sides to any story.

A report by liberal news organization AlterNet claimed on Thursday that conservatives are "burying" stories on the news aggregator. "A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives."

Conservatives--in this case, "Digg Patriots"--"cheat" by voting down Digg submissions with a liberal bent, AlterNet claims. "This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction."

I'm not going to argue with the basics of the report because this sort of thing goes on with both conservative and liberal groups. (AlterNet could have easily expanded the scope of "certain groups" to include liberals but chose not to.) I am going to take issue, however, with its tenor and balance, as it was implied by some blogs that the AlterNet findings were coming from a neutral source.

Specifically, when AlterNet inserts a paragraph listing all of the things Digg Patriots allegedly hate, then claims generally in the last sentence that Digg Patriots "just love to hate," Alternet forfeits any claim to balance--and possibly veracity.

I visit Digg's front door often, and what I usually find is hardly proof that conservative groups are succeeding in any way. Here's a very unscientific sampling of what I've found as some of the most-dugg (top 10) submissions as I randomly visited the Digg front door during the last few days. "Fox News is shockingly old" and "Conservapedia:E=mc2 Is A Liberal Conspiracy and "Liberals Start F*** Tea Party Campaign." (I've omitted the last ink because the original headline uses three letters of a four-letter expletive.)

A September 2008 report from PBS titled "Digg Puts Focus on Politics, Bringing Charges of Liberal Bias" says:… Read more

The big fight between the Pentagon and Wikileaks has gotten to the high school breakup stage: the Pentagon wants Wikileaks to put its mix tapes, photos, and t-shirts in a shoebox and mail them back. Also, another rousing argument on Net neutrality, this time with Brian Cooley's uniquely capitalist viewpoint in the mix. Good times.

A report posted Thursday by online progressive news magazine AlterNet has detailed a year-long "undercover operation" at infiltrating a group of conservative Digg.com super users called the "Digg Patriots," who use their collective voting power to control what stories get onto Digg's front page.

AlterNet's report details tactics used by the 100-some members of the user group, who allegedly communicate through a Yahoo Groups site, and have done so since early 2009.

Its members cull both Digg's front page and its upcoming section to find what they consider liberal or otherwise anticonservative … Read more

Social news sites Digg and Reddit arguably have the same core objective: providing a never-ending stream of interesting links from around the Web. But there's long been grumbling among users on both sites about which site has a larger influence, and where each one gets its source material.

To answer these questions, and a few others, personal finance site Rate Rush watched both sites for two weeks and tracked who was submitting stories, which domains were getting featured on the front page, the most popular topics and words used in titles, and the velocity of links by hour and … Read more

You will be familiar with the Old Spice Man. He's the embodiment of the kind of man every man-loving being would love to keep on being with.

Tuesday, Old Spice Man decided to use all the tools of the Web at his disposal in order to show just how body, mind, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, and Reddit (and even Facebook) can work together to sell rather strange-smelling deodorant.

For just one day, people could post their comments, questions or "whatever else" to @OldSpice on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere and the ones that were voted most popular, would receive, … Read more

Social news site Digg.com is set to launch the fourth major iteration of its site. Last week the company invited an extra 20,000 users to its version four alpha test--a number that is likely to grow in the coming days and weeks.

Given a tumultuous past few months for the company, which has seen a leadership shake-up at its very highest levels, and what insiders have described as an "exodus" of key employees, version four is more than just a redesign--it's effectively a reboot of the Digg brand.

The most obvious question is whether this new version of the site, which has been teased by the company for the past year, is truly better. The answer is a resounding yes. It's faster, cleaner, and easier to both Digg stories up, as well as submit them. It also does a much better job at filtering the large number of submitted stories by their source. But even with those improvements, Digg feels like the same site it was a few years ago, which will likely do little to silence the site's critics.

A short history lessonHow long has it been since the last major Digg revision? Try June 2006, which is when version three was announced at a bar party, then publicly launched a few months later. Back then, the biggest new feature was the inclusion of video and podcasting content that could play right on Digg story pages. These two additions were brought on as separate sections of the site--both of which would later be consolidated into just a video section when the site added an image category. Digg version 3 also brought a face lift that would let users customize what categories they saw on the front page.

Between then and now, Digg has had a few tune ups, including: • a complete re-write of the site code which ditched MySQL in favor of the more decentralized Cassandra • an overhauled search engine • a framing toolbar called the DiggBar, which drew plenty of controversy in its year or so of existence.

There was also the launch of mobile apps, a user uprising over free speech, and several murmurs of an acquisition.

So what does Digg's fourth version bring to the table? Let's break it down by feature:

New followers/following paradigm, and a social news feed Similar to Twitter and Facebook's fan pages, Digg users can now follow a content source and see when new stories from that particular site have been submitted. Alongside Digg users, you're able to import people from Twitter, Facebook, and Google. This process is actually the first thing users see when logging into the new Digg, though it can be skipped entirely.

The way it works, is that Digg breaks down profiles by category. Each of these categories can be followed or unfollowed, the former of which means new items from these contacts will show up in Digg's new "My News" section. This is simply a listing of the most recent or popular content from sites or people you're following--akin to what you'd get on Facebook's news feed if you were to filter by links only.

How important the new My News page is to Digg is pretty clear based on the fact that it's the default page when visiting Digg.com while logged on. Users actually have to click over to the "Top News" tab of the site to see what unregistered users get. This isn't even something you can change in Digg's drastically simplified user settings panel.

Digg has also added an additional layer of personalization to the site's sidebar, which now populates the top links from people you're following. These are shown in order of how many of your friends Dugg any particular link. And clicking on the story pages themselves shows you those friends in chronological digging order.… Read more

A management shake-up, tepid traffic, and a hyped product revamp that still hasn't seen the light of day: Much has been made, lately, of the woes facing onetime social-news darling Digg.

But even if things turn around after the release of Digg's "Version 4," which will go live later this year following an alpha test that's starting to make the rounds, its launch will give Digg an additional challenge. It's built up an elaborate network of influence and deal making between media companies and "power users" over the years, and the Version … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--With more than 200,000 apps bursting the seams of Apple's App Store, how can developers get their projects to stand out?

That's a common sentiment among those creating apps, and among those looking for quality content for their iPhones and iPads. But to Seth Socolow, himself a developer and businessman, it was the question that inspired what has become one of the hottest tickets on the Bay Area technology scene.

On Tuesday night, Socolow and Dale Larson, his partner in a consulting firm called SF App Studio, hosted the sixth iteration of their app showcase, the … Read more

Facebook's privacy policy promises, in no uncertain terms, that it doesn't "share your information with advertisers without your consent." Only "non-personally identifiable" data, it says, are shared.

But the social-networking site confirmed late Thursday that it has, at least in some circumstances, sent the user name of a Facebook member to its advertising partners. That can be used to glean a person's name, interests, and list of friends.

A Facebook spokesman told CNET that the apparent privacy leak has been fixed.

News of this data sharing, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal … Read more