Web Crawler

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.

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