Sites can block the DiggBar, but is it worth it?
John Gruber of the blog Daring Fireball doesn't like what Digg's doing with its DiggBar, and has come up with a relatively simple way to block it on his own site. By making a small change to his site's PHP files, any shortened DiggURL created for one of his pages will automatically take users to a separate page Gruber has created that chides the company.
In Gruber's opinion, the service, which automatically shortens a site's URL and adds some of Digg's features to the top of the source content, is bad for both users and sites. Gruber says it's tainting the purity of a site's URL, which also affects search engine optimization and the capability for users to easily bookmark content. "URLs are the building block of the Web. They tell the user where they are. They give you something to bookmark to go back or to share with others," he says.
But is Gruber right?
As for the SEO, John Quinn--Digg's vice president of engineering, came out on Thursday and said that Digg had been in touch with search engines like Google and traffic monitoring services like Comscore, Compete, Quantcast, and Nielsen prior to launching the DiggBar, and that pre-launch testing had shown that it was not, in fact, changing the accuracy of traffic numbers. In fact, in the week since launching, Quinn said that the DiggBar was giving both Digg and publishers a noticeable boost in traffic.
One area where Gruber has a point though is with user bookmarking and link identification. Many sites use URLs that contain the headline, or certain keywords about the story. For readers this is a quick way to figure out where a link is going. For Digg, part of the problem with this is that its users can completely rewrite the headline and description of a story when submitting it to the site, which means the last way to see what something is--prior to clicking on it, is to check the URL, which is what the DiggBar effectively kills.
While Digg retains the source of the story right in front of the description, along with the full URL on the DiggBar, it's also changing what users are seeing in their address bar, which is yet another place where users are used to figuring out where they are and what they're looking at.
So how does this factor into bookmarking, and more importantly--social bookmarking? For personal bookmarking, Digg is replacing a site's Favicon (yet another identifier) with its own, along with replacing the site's standard URL with a shortened Digg one. Add a few shortened Digg bookmarks to your own personal bookmarks and you'll see where this can hinder the capability to sort, and quickly parse saved links.
For social bookmarking, sites like Delicious merely show the hottest links by page title (something the DiggBar does not alter), however when browsing the URLs alone, yet again it's a sea of Digg.com links.
Where Digg may have to change its tune is in giving publishers a way to opt out of having their site URLs shortened, along with a way to keep the bar from showing up on the top of the page. If Digg were to meet publishers in the middle, and act like any other link shortening service out there (TinyURL, Bit.ly, et al) and convert the Digg URL into the site's normal URL, I think it would go a long way toward preserving the happiness of publishers who want to maintain their site's identity.
Josh Lowensohn writes for Webware.com, CNET's blog about Web applications and services. E-mail Josh, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/Josh. 
Why is one of MSN's top search terms "Google.com"?
Great article. I was waiting for someone to explain the SEO part of things.
Digg's toolbar thing is pretty annoying. It's like they're trying to brand the internet as digg content.
Just because it is the user's choice to use the Diggbar does not mean that Digg has the right to frame the content of a given site. There is a reason that <frameset> and <frame> tags are no longer in HTML5 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/) and is not in XHTML2.0 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/). Frames have long since been used to misrepresent and hijack content in ways that are malicious or are not representative of the website whose content is being used. Site owners also have rights. Diggbar infringes upon those heavily.
I am replying to guy asking "WHY?". BTW how much did CNET pay for this comment system or it came free? :)
the fact that this is even an issue with site admins is absurd.
This isn't about users. This is about site and content owners, who are now having their content stolen by Digg. Digg is no longer linking to other sites, they are taking other sites' pages and displaying them in a frame on their own site. They are then passing a status code for those urls that gives no benefit to the original site.
In other words, they are stealing content.
They are also allowing their new shortened url pages to be indexed by Google, which they've said they're not - they're lying about that, which anybody can check themselves. And given that Digg is bigger than 99% of the sites they're stealing content from, Google is probably going to end up showing a large number of those pages higher in their results than the originating sites.
Yes, diggbar should be blocked. By everybody who runs a web site. It's completely evil and shouldn't exist. And I guarantee lawsuits are going to fly over it eventually.
I have been closing the Digg Bar for every site that I go to.
I hope that one or more large corporations decides to sue Digg to protect the URLs that they have as part of their sites material copyright. The other services that are available for shortening of the URL only effect the URL when NOT directly on the page. The Digg Bar shortens the URL when you are on the page and hides the path that the content providers created.
The one thing that made me frown about the diggbar is that it wasn't removed going to another site. The other site had nothing to do with the story so what is the use of the diggbar then?
But no developer is going to use the diggbar as an excuse to get lazy with their urls. That's a defeatist attitude. And the diggbar is trivial to just block.
Let me just add that the attempt at balance in this article is misguided. The diggbar is a pure evil move on Digg's part, and if CNet is serious about reporting on tech news, then they need to call it out as such and educate people about what it's really doing. The amazing thing to me is that this exact practice (displaying one web site in the frameset of another) was tried by various sleazy web sites in the 1990's and was utterly discredited, along with popup ads and other evil marketing schemes, yet here we are again. Why isn't CNet reporting this for what it is?
Funny thing is, I don't remember them asking their users "Should we implement this?" nor even if they didn't ask, I didn't see them to use available methods for choosing the design.
Not just the framesets are so 1990s (as in Digg fashion), doing changes without asking the user (or customer) is completely 1990s too.
It's wrong. It's evil. It needs to be taken behind the woodshed and shot repeatedly until it stops showing any form of life, then buried under 12 feet of earth and encased in concrete. It was wrong in the 1990's and it's just as wrong today - no, even more wrong today.
Just because you're ignorant as to how the web works doesn't mean you know what's best for everyone.
A better solution would have been a script authors could optionally embeded in to their web page or as a browser extension.
Well, at least not entirely.
Let's say Digg worked out the SEO part 100%. Then it's cool to use? Of course not!
1. It's poor web etiquette. What if every site did it? ("Yeah, but Digg is just not 'any' site.") OK, what if the top 100 sites did it? What if Google did it?
2. It's ego driven. You love Digg so much, why would you want to leave? How about you just stay on Digg, and we'll pull over that site and put it on the page for you. Copyright violation, anyone?
3. Digg is putting their ads on other people's sites. In their frame, click on something to take action, and the frame expands complete with an advertisement. Digg displays your content below, but puts their ad at the top. Above any of the ads you might have. So, not only are they displaying your content to generate ad revenue, but they're also diluting the value of your ads by putting their ad first.
4. This isn't about user experience, or to make it easier for the Digg community, or whatever else they're feeding everyone. It's about money. Digg's only motivation for the Diggbar is to increase the Digg audience, increase the time on the site, increase revenue, and so on. Whatever else Kevin Rose says is part of the Pollyanna PR spin. Making money is great. I'm a big fan of that personally. But, when you're pulling this kind of crap to make your money, i guess you're better off putting the "it's really for the user" spin on it!
5. It's not opt-in. What if a site doesn't want the Diggbar at the top of it's page? I mean, it's not Digg's page, right? If a web site owner doesn't want his user experience altered, that his/her right, yes? ("Well, they can block it using various tools.") Why should they have to? Isn't that the unsolicited emailer's creed? "You didn't ask for this, but if you don't like it, just click on the unsubscribe link." Diggbar sounds spammy to me.
For being the tech saint he is, lover of open-source, feel-good guy, I expected a lot more out of Kevin Rose.
- by rickster2515 April 14, 2009 11:47 AM PDT
- Its easy to get rid of the diggbar, just put this code in your page's header:
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(31 Comments)<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
<!--
if (top.location != self.location) {
top.location = self.location
}
//-->
</script>
Tada! No more diggbar.