Ryan Underdown » digg

[PIC] Why Digg Sucks (reason # …)

Ryan Underdown — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:37:25 +0000

Digg’s war against it’s userbase continues.

The View Outside My Office Window

Ryan Underdown — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:16:22 +0000

I (edit used to – our new offices are sweet David thanks!) work at Falcon Field in Mesa, Arizona. I stare out this window for hours every day. I’m originally from Providence Rhode Island and you just don’t see views like these. The land is so flat here that you can see hundreds of miles of skyline.

Digg Takes A Step Back From Disintermediation

Ryan Underdown — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:16:58 +0000

One of the driving forces that led me to become a frequent user of Digg was the idea of disintermediation of news; that the userbase set the rules and determined what sites were newsworthy and which sites should be banned. In recent months following the DVD encryption key mayhem that rocked the site, things appear to have changed without much of anyone taking notice.

Muhammad Saleem noted a while back:

As I recall, according to Digg policy:
When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned.

That section of the Terms of Use has recently been changed to:

Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all. To report Terms of Use abuse, please email: abuse@digg.com

A search of front page promoted stories submitted from prisonplanet.com for example reveals 30 stories promoted to the front page of Digg. Conversely, searching while excluding buried stories reveals that only 16 of those stories haven’t been buried by the users. In addition, two stories were reported by the userbase as possibly inaccurate. It even appears that prisonplanet has been banned in the past only to be reinstated.

(NOTE: I don’t write this to single out prisonplanet.com, it was merely the first site I found that had a lot of buried stories. LGF or MichelleMalkin.com probably fit the bill as well)

This recent step back from the ideal of “disintermediation” has been subtle but the motivations for it are very cloudy. Can any of you think why they would do this?

Swivel: Data 2.0 vs Digg Users

Ryan Underdown — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:41:50 +0000

While checking out Ruby on Rails this week I came across a cool website @ swivel.com. I am an econ buff and the ways in which you can compare data are both amazing and easy, enabling me to waste several hours that I should have been working. After perusing the usual high correlation – zero causation I grabbed a fresh copy of Chris Finke’s compiled data on the top 1000 users at Digg, conveniently formatted in CSV for easy upload to swivel. There were some interesting results. I noticed some users I’d never heard of that had dugg quite a few stories and another that had submitted over 5,000 stories only to have 7 hit the front page. The perseverance award goes to rodtrent.

Of course it should come as no surprise that the most popular digg user remains Kevin Rose.

A few other items of interest for digg users can be found here and here. Overall I think swivel is a great tool. My one complaint is that there is no way to make datasets private (and selectively shareable). If you could I would definitely use it for work.

Feedburner: The Easiest Way To Manage A Digg Campaign

Ryan Underdown — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:33:56 +0000

I hadn’t checked in to my account at feedburner.com for some time and imagine my surprise when I noticed a new feature that allows you to syndicate your Digg.com account’s activity (or alternately a frequent poster’s activity who you wish to bury). Under the ‘optimize’ tab there is a link splicer option. Link splicer allows you add your recently bookmarked sites from your del.icio.us, furl, bloglines, and Digg.com accounts.

All you need to do is add in the digg user’s account name who you wish to promote/bury and instantly you have a way to send daily email to your feed’s subscribers. Let the Ron Paul spam ensue.

Feel free to bury the articles I digg by subscribing to my feed