Slashdot. Fitness-function. News 2. News 3. So, How’s That Digg Recommendation Engine Been Working For You? One of the biggest recent announcements from Digg, and one they put much emphasis on, was the recommendation engine; a system that learns from your digging habits and feeds you stories you might like based on what diggers like you recently found interesting. After using it for quite some time, like most such ideas, I find it utterly useless. I use Digg in the following way: I check out the front page and the upcoming Technology section for interesting stories. The recommendation engine merely gets in my way, making me go through a couple of extra clicks to get what I want (whenever Digg doesn't automatically log me in, which is often).
The stories that the recommendation engine feeds me seem completely random; standard categorization by topics works way better, and checking only what's recommended feels like I'm missing out on good stories. In a way, Digg itself is a big recommendation engine: it's a bunch of news stories and links selected by wisdom of crowds. DiggFilter vs. DiggSuggest: Third Party Recommendation Engines H. Digg's long-awaited recommendation engine might be the most anticipated upcoming feature at the social news site.
It was first mentioned by Kevin Rose at the EmTech conference last September, and a month later in an interview with Jay Adelson. In December of last year we published an interview with the creator of third party Digg recommendation engine DiggFilter. Today, DiggFilter isn't your only option. This morning, via Digg (where else?) So while we don't know how each service works, surely we can figure out which works better. DiggFilter The point of DiggFilter is to suggest "fresh content," according to its founder. But after entering my name, DiggFilter told me that I was "a tough one" and warned me that my suggestions "may not be accurate. " Yes, it suggested things I like, but none of it was stuff I was unlikely to find.
DiggFilter offered me a way to refine the results, but that just made things even worse -- all it did was strip out the non-RWW suggestions. DiggSuggest Conclusion. Spotback - Personal News. Ravi’s Rants » Blog Archive » Digg Traffic Is Worth Diddly Squat. … if you are relying on the (potential) swarm of Digg visitors to click on your Adsense ads. Personally, I think the spike in traffic you will get by getting a home-page link on Digg won’t be worth anything at all, unless you are selling something that Digg users want. Now, I don’t know what that something is, but whatever it is, it is going to be a hard sell.
Most of the traffic from Digg will be geeks and nerds, just like me. I’m an avid blogger, digger, googler, you know – the self-proclaimed “uber-web savvy” type. I have family (my wife, BIL) and friends who are in IT, and almost none of them ever clicks on Google Adsense ads, not even on Google’s own search pages, let alone on 3rd-party web sites. This is not a Digg-specific phenomenon. I’m one of Google’s biggest proponents. Here’s why: Google’s text ads were novel for a while, and everyone clicked on them, similar to the novelty of banners and popups when they were first introduced. . - Ravi Jayagopal Founder, LinkOverLoad.com. David Cohn's blog. Brian.Shaler.name | Blog. Socially Given. 3monkeys » Observations on Digg’s Quality. One of the reasons I have become somewhat disenchanted with digg is the quality of the content.
There have been many theories as to why the quality has dropped. When I pondered this issue and how to analyze it, the first line of attack was to determine who was submitting the majority of articles to digg. Digg allows each and every user to view this information, simply navigate to and sort by submitted. Below is a screen shot at the time this article was written. If we consider the numbers, this shows that between the top 8 submitters a total of 23,953 stories have been submitted, of which only 2442 stories have reached the front page of digg.
This translates to a 10% success rate, or to look at it another way 9 articles out of every 10 were not interesting enough to make the front page. The problem is not isolated to these users. Only one person enjoys a 100% submission rate. So where does that leave digg? 3Monkeys Be Sociable, Share! Loading ... Will Digg Get Flanked? « Meditations on Meaning. Hot Deals, Free Coupons, Rebates, Dell, Amazon, Best Buy, Buy.co. Digg and the So-Called “Wisdom of Mobs” - Mashable! In a recent post about Digg, I wrote: "it’s obvious to see that Digg users are growing in power. And while this could be a force for good, it also means that an unsupported claim on a blog could quickly be blown out of proportion. " Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened to the O'Reilly contributor Steve Mallett, who was accused of stealing Digg's CSS by an anonymous blogspot blogger. This O'Reilly post explains more: Steve Mallett, O'Reilly Network editor and blogger, was very publicly accused, via a Digg story, of stealing Digg's CSS pages.
The story was voted up rapidly and made the homepage, acquiring thousands of diggs (thumbs-up) from the Digg community along the way. There was only one problem: Steve didn't steal Digg's CSS pages. The real story has now made its way onto the Digg frontpage, but the issue has led some bloggers to (incorrectly) criticize the "wisdom of crowds" philosophy. For the wisdom of crowds to work, every individual must work independently. PS. Greg, PS. Alex Bosworths Weblog: Dynamics of Digg. Digg View. Digg the rigged? A closer look at Diggs de. Digg / Technology. Pligg Beta. & Diggs 8 million social freeloaders | Di. According to Digg CEO Jay Adelson, “The point of Digg is to capture the interests of the Internet masses and use that interest to help organize the huge amounts of information on the Web.
" Digg’s masses, however, are passive readers of other’s “Diggs,” rather than active contributors to a Digg “collective wisdom.” Digg reportedly attracted 8.5 million visitors in May, but only has 304,000 registered users, submitting, on average, about 2000 stories a day. As I point out in “Social freeloaders: Is there a collective wisdom and can the Web obtain it? ,” the Social Web that is purported to be harnessing a “collective wisdom” of millions, is merely reflecting the opinions of a small number of self-selected active contributors: A user-contribution reality-check is undoubtedly in order.
Also see Digg: 'newspaper of the Web', or its gossip column? Digg lab. A Complex Governing System Needs Constant Update. An Editorial o. Digg.com is a System. Systems Need Constant Improvment. There’s no such thing as perfection. The inability to accept this simple fact has conquered men (and women) since the beginning of time. The obsession of this fact is equally paralyzing. Any government system, website, or choice of girlfriends will always have it’s faults. The idea that an exact average of what digg users think the front page should look like is what belongs there is a beautiful concept.
If digg were a complete and true democracy, we could impeach Kevin Rose. The second you believe the systems perfect it’s doomed. A digg section for digg? But what if the current system gave a way to deliver a vote to users on matters exactly along these lines? Removal of the “ok this is lame” button. You can’t argue with a website that delivers as much news to as many people as digg.com does. I love digg. Why Digg Isn't "The Wisdom of Crowds"-- The Glass. There's been quite a bit of recent discussion about how gaming of Digg's system shows that "The Wisdom of Crowds" is failing. The problem is that Digg doesn't implement the wisdom of crowds.
And, it seems, most of the participants in the discussion don't know the difference. The criteria for when the effect that the book talks about kicks in are fairly simple. They require that every member of a wise crowd is acting without knowing anyone else's actions before they choose. That means that, if Digg were actually based on the WOC principle, you'd never see how many people had dugg an article before you choose to digg it yourself. Additionally, you'd only ever vote on a random selection of articles. Basically, if you're voting on a list of already popular articles, you're seeing the aggregated existing inputs to the system. To truly invoke the wisdom of crowds in a cream-of-the-crop link aggregator like Digg, all voting should be done seperate from displaying links.
Social Web Design » Digg’s Design Dilemma. This past week’s Digg controversy is one in a growing number of incidents that suggest that a small group of users are having an undue influence on the promotion of stories. In response, Digg is changing the way that it handles votes by adding complexity to its ranking algorithm. I think that’s the wrong approach, so here’s another idea: change the actual design of the site…that’s the real problem. The most recent controversy happened on September 5th, when someone named jesusphreak posted Digg the Rigged? , an in-depth article exposing some of the curious details of recently-popular stories on digg. Many of the stories, jp pointed out, were dugg by members of the Digg Top 30, or the 30 most popular digg members (popular being measured by number of stories submitted that were promoted to the frontpage). This was not the first time that someone has pointed out this phenomenon.
These incidents, taken together, are more than coincidence… Don’t blame the users Blame the design Other factors. How Digg Gets Everything Backwards.. And How to Fix It. 1. Digg is a wonderful idea.. but it's horribly broken. Of course many people have been raising concerns about the manipulation and irrationality of Digg front page items (for example here, here, here, here, here, and here). Recently the problem of "cabals" of Digg story promoters is getting more and more attention.
To their credit, the Digg administrators have made it possible to track who is submitting and promoting which stories, and the results are dramatic. A tiny portion of Digg members are submitting stories, and tiny networks of friends are promoting each other's stories, resulting in a very tiny elite group of people determining an overwhelming amount of content that gets attention on the Digg front pages. Kevin Rose, one of the Digg founders, has recently announced new efforts to try to outsmart these organized groups of co-promoters, in an effort to "catch" them and downgrade their influence on voting.
Digg suffers from a fundamental flaw in design. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Digg as a Game. Update: This article was dugg and made it to the Digg front page. The traffic came and I discuss the aftermath here. Below is the voting chart for that story: Inspired by Greg’s insightful post, I thought I’d take a minute (or more) on explaining how Digg is a game. Elements of a Game In Game Theory, we care about the elements that arise from interactive decisions. Players – who is interacting? In digg, players are the voters; the voters have n options; and, where non-paid voters are concerned, reputation is the over-riding incentive for voting a story (top-digger status, etc.); information come in the form of following the vast web of links of blogs on the web. How does Digg work?
I’ll use Philipp’s concise summary of how digg works: The Digg system of measuring a story’s importance is based on a semi-random set of people voting for or against a semi-random set of news stories. The Urn Game In graduate school, I played a really fun and revealing game called “The Urn Game.” Others Chime In.