Brilliant Digg Comments

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Gizmodo/Lifehacker Announce No Digg Spams

Two of the world's largest blogs Gizmodo and Lifehacker announced today that they will be dropping the yellow Digg button on their articles, unless they are exclusive or original content created by themselves.

Gizmodo and Lifehacker also encourage their fans to stop submitting all of their posts to Digg. It make sense because many Digg users are just submitting everything they read to Digg. As much as I like their ideas behind it, I think it is hard to regulate and people will just continue to submit whatever they feel like.

It seems like 90% of the technology blogs that I read have the Digg badge or some sort of social bookmarking buttons... Are we going to see other major blogs going to follow suit?

Digg, HD DVD key, Overflow

Forget about the take down of top Digg user list, this is definitely the most incredible thing that ever happened in Digg.

It looks like Digg censored some sensitive stories that contain HD DVD encryption key, which their CEO explained it may get them into trouble against the intellectual property law...
but the Digg mob is not giving in and fight back with the power of people.

All the stories that made it to the front page are related to this topic and lots of other HD DVD keys stories floating around as well.

I am sure Digg and the crowd would remember the power of social media.

*Update*

Kevin Rose made it clear they WON'T delete anymore stories contain the code! [via Digg Blog]
Yes, Digg is compromising with the crowd!

Related links:
Digg Shutdown
Blogger: Digg Banned me for Typing a Number
32 Digits Driving Digg Crazy
Mob Takes Over at Digg, Widespread User Revolt
Scenes from the Digg Implosion

Blogger Custom Domain

On Sunday, Spinchange has dugg one of my post here and it was made to Digg home page. After that, the site got a big spike of traffic and got 3,000 visits.

It was perfectly timed because I have switched over to Blogger's Custom Domain Hosting the week before that,

"If you don't care to have blogspot.com in your blog's address, though, you can
get a domain of your own. We'll continue to host all your content as before, but it will be displayed at your new address. You can register domain names from any of a number of different registrars, and you can use .com, .org, .net or any other valid addresses. Remember: you only need to get the domain name; you don't have to pay extra for hosting service."

As I still had the extreme basic hosting plan before, I think the bandwidth would have been over the limit already. The advantages of using custom domain in Blogger included:

1. You own your blog's domain name, so you can sell it or do whatever you want with the domain later.
2. Give your blog it own custom domain identity.
3. You don't have to pay for hosting. You got unlimited web space and bandwidth with Google Hosting without paying anything.
4. It makes life easier if you are switching to Wordpress from *.blogspot, because you won't be losing that many links.

For everyone out there who would like to make a switch to custom domain or using Wordpress, it is recommended to do it early. It is definitely a must for any *.blogspot users who would like to take a step forward.

Digg Unbanned Sites

According to Naffziger's Net, Digg has unbanned all but 4 of the banned sites couple days ago. There are different speculations all over the blogosphere. In fact, the site seems very slow and not very stable these days; I have even seen a dugg story was broken into 2 halves. There is no words from the official Digg office regarding to the unbanned sites issue yet.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch had a chat with Kevin Rose,

"Digg thinks they are winning the war over the problem of "grouping" behavior (where groups of Digg accounts are controlled or effectively controlled by a person or group and can push stories to the home page). The changes they've made to Digg over the last few months, Rose says, allow them to monitor grouping behavior and stop it before it can drive a story to the home page. Thus, there is no real need to ban any particular site from Digg. They are confident that if a story from a previously banned site makes it to the home page, it deserves to be there."

It sounds like Digg maybe studying the digg behaviour of their user groups in some kind and putting a final test to the new algorithm. My guess is that they might have further degraded the value of the friend's vote on a user's friend list, which remind me of their vision of creating a friend system that is based on a user interests.

11870

For the last two days, "11870" is the highest search term in Technorati. But what is 11870? Is it a short code for a mobile service? Whose number is it?

Zenblogger has the answer,

"11870.com is Spanish bookmarking networking directory that tracks it’s
users professional and business suggestions and reviews. Basically a user is given a profile page where they list professional services or businesses they have used and they can share opinions, photos, videos, labels, etc…"

This sounds like a Spanish Digg/Netscape to me! Just by looking @ the design of 11870.com, it has certain similarities with Digg/Netscape. I also see that they rank popular places, photos, videos. It sounds like a good place for some gaming to me!

How Important is Customer Service?

The top Digg story of the day is "Nintendo: Customer service gone shockingly right", with more than 200+ diggers commenting the story. It shows that how high customers actually value customer service and how few companies actually can do it right.

Most of the commenter are praising Nintendo's service and many of expressed how poor other companies' customer services are. Most companies know that they need better customer service, but it is easier to say than done.

Maybe Nintendo main office should print out that digg thread and sticking it everywhere in the office to remind people what separate them from the others. "Wii have good customer service!"

WSJ's Wiz of Buzz Review

Ever since the Digg's top user list dropped from the site couple of weeks ago, the biggest Digg related buzz has been the WSJ's "Wizards of Buzz" article. WSJ has contacted many top users of the major web2.0 sites and done a little write up on many of them.

After the article is published both online and offline, there doesn't seem to have any impact on these Web 2.0 sites right away. The fact is, the traffic of Digg and Netscape didn't increase significantly after the release.

Here are some of the reasons why:

1) The article was published on the weekend, where most people are spending their time offline with their families and friends. Who is reading the weekend WSJ anyway?

2) The article covered all the major web2.0 sites, so it is like a roundup on the industry itself. The impact to a individual site is minimal.

3) It is not easy for the outside world to understand what impact does the featured users made.

It is good to see some faces of the user behind web2.0 in a major media. After all, it is hyped as user created content right? The biggest winner is probably WSJ themselves though (look at the traffic increase and the links generated pointing to their site) .

GoDaddy's Superbowl Ad featuring Kevin Rose

One of the biggest buzz in the Digg community this week was Kevin Rose's appearance on GoDaddy's Superbowl Ad. Anything that has to do with "Kevin Rose+National TV+Super Bowl" would be huge in Digg.

It was a pretty good idea to get Kevin Rose appeared on the big screen, as it would drive tons of web traffic to watch the online video and generating tons of diggs. However, many bloggers think that the commercial itself is pretty lame. It says nothing about GoDaddy other than saying that they like to party and fool around. The Diggers are also very disappointed at how unattractive the dancers are and of course Kevin Rose's appearance is too SHORT! Anyhow, it seems like GoDaddy.com traffic seems to have increased significantly after the Superbowl (it better be, after spending millions putting this ad together).

It will be interesting to see how it plays out for GoDaddy in the long run. This move very likely will put their company head and shoulder above other major competitions. Godaddy must be tired counting all the incoming links pointing to their site.