Surprise! Gaming Digg works!

Just in case you didn’t believe it, despite all the evidence to the contrary, gaming Digg works.

Check out this article on Wired News. Fantastic. The author’s site was eventually buried, but then again, the author made the site specifically to be stupid.

You can easily imagine a site that someone actually cares about, but is not necessarily outstanding, could be fraudulently promoted by U/S.  I don’t have a solution for Digg, but it is interesting.

It’s really just another case where we should not be blindly enamored by the “power of the people”.

Update: Anti-Wired post from Michael Arrington. My response? You’ve got to be kidding me. I can’t speak to previous articles in Wired about the demise of Digg, but investigative journalism is totally reasonable, and the author of the Wired article didn’t do anything so crazy in her investigation to deserve that much wrath. Frankly, I don’t think this would be news at all if Digg’s management wasn’t so adamant in saying that they can not be gamed. That’s pretty much “Bring it on!”, if I’ve ever heard it.

Justin on Digg: Firing Customers

Congrats, Justin!

Justin made it on the front page of Digg last week for his blog post on firing troublesome customers.  Now, he’s responding to some backlash against that.

Digg 3.0 launches, but where’s the controversy?

As TechCrunch reports, Digg 3.0 launches on Monday, but amid all this hype (and the hype from the Netscape launch), I'm left to wonder what happened to all the controversy around the forevergeek story?

Let me say first that the the Digg changes do look fantastic and should make Digg that much cooler. Great job!

The attention span of the American people is already unbelievably short, but the attention span of the blogging community has got to be record-breakingly short. Both Digg and TechMeme demonstrate this everyday, with stories that sit at the top of the queue for a mere hours, before being completely ignored forever. It's always hard to tell what's real and what's worthless with all the hype that the community pushes around.

Netscape can make Digg popular

So the news today is that Netscape is launching a "Digg killer". (Note how the entry used to be say "Digg-like site" instead of "Digg killer". Gotta love the sensational headlines!)

OK, ok, I went to www.netscape.com this morning, and I was shocked to find out that it had a Google Pagerank of 9. Wow. Who still goes to Netscape? No one I know ever thinks about Netscape. Shows you how much I know about stuff.

Tech Crunch has some interesting things to say about it, but I think it's missing a big part about it. It's not really about the features or even the number of page views that Netscape.com gets. The interesting thing about this launch is that AOL/Netscape have the opportunity to reach a completely different audience than Digg. The editorial panel (who are getting slammed by the community purists out there) can guide the stories to of more popular interest than geeky interest.  And that's very important.  If they can get the mainstream market to vote on stories, and build a community around that, then they have something.

Check out Digg anytime and the top stories are the same: product launches, tech company announcements, or freakish stories of the truly weird. I know it might just totally suck, but people want to see stories about Britney's raging hormones and Brangelina's baby.

Despite the popularity of Digg in certain circles, the vast majority of people have not heard of it. And with the demographic that Digg currently has, it will never have the mass appeal that will attract the non-geeks out there. That's where the "evil" editorial panel is valuable: you can guide the direction of the stories, and therefore, guide the direction of the demographic that you attract.  And after you build up enough of that demographic, the editorial panel can step aside and let the community do it's magic.

You know who could do it better? I think CNN.com, actually, because they have the stories, they have the offline brand, and they also have a 9 Pagerank. And strangely, they also are owned by AOL-Time Warner.  Hmmm…. Conspiracy?