ReadWriteWeb

The other evening, I got into a conversation with an older gentleman whose name I have since forgotten. His main complaint is that writing today feels more like "blurbs" formatted for word-skimming Internet users - more like chunks or nuggets and less like hearty, homemade meals. He told me to check out the writer Don DeLillo. I didn't have time to whip out my iPhone and make a note, so I just catalogued it in my mental Instapaper-like memory, marking it "read later." Who knows when "later" will ever come. For now, at least I've made it to Don DeLillo's Wikipedia page, which I have just Instapapered for later.

So what does this have to do with writing for the Internet, story virility and Digg? A new study out of Cornell University by Tad Hogg and Kristina Lerman called the Social Dynamics of Digg looks at ways to predict a story's popularity on Digg, which many believe is over. Before we even look into the study, a caveat and something to ponder: As Internet users, are we becoming even more formulaic in our ways of thinking and clicking? Or is this simplification of story headlines actually driving us to dig deeper into the "how's" and "why's" of stories? Perhaps the "Predicting a story's popularity on Digg" will provide some answers.

"how do you feel" tweeted @horse_ebooks yesterday, quietly. Punctuation, capitalization and context were not necessary. @horse_ebooks - I refuse to identify it by the man behind the screen - knows how to ask this type of sensitive, potentially loaded question to a list of 52,770 Twitter followers and 4,333 Facebook fans. Despite the Internet popularity of cats and dogs, there is no way a self-absorbed furry meowser or a loving pooch could ask a user, or the entire Internet, this same question.

"The emotional connection between humans and horses is more calm, quiet and non-verbal ideally," says Sujatha Ramakirshna, M.D., a Chicago-based child and adolescent psychiatrist. She runs the website TeachingKidsEmpathy.com, which is devoted to promoting the development of compassion in young people. And as a child growing up outside of Fort Worth, Texas, she rode horses. "Horses will know if you're afraid or confident better than you. You really can't lie to a horse."

When Facebook launched frictionless sharing last year, users flipped out. These days, it seems like they're starting to come around. At least, that's what Digg would like us to believe.

Digg launched its very own social reader on Facebook in late December 2011. Now, 2 million impressions later, it's adding new features that it believes Facebook-Diggers (or maybe it should be Digg-Facebookers?) will enjoy. This announcement comes on the same day as the Facebook open graph rollout, and ties into Facebook's vision of a frictionless sharing future.

Today Digg and Facebook are getting close. Real close. Digg is unleashing its new social reader on Facebook. When users turn on social sharing from their Digg accounts, all the stories they read will be frictionlessly shared to their news feed, Timeline and their friends' news tickers.

This new feature smooshes together your Facebook social graph and your Digg social graph, two social sets that might not really have much in common. This is yet another attempt at making Digg more social, following on the heels of Digg's real-time newswire and social newsrooms, which function like topical channels curated by users. Will this new feature help Digg get back into social news?

Digg has made the beta of Digg Newsrooms available to the public. Newsrooms are topical channels (like Technology, Politics or Entertainment) that use awards as incentives to motivate users to curate them. Users cannot currently create their own newsroom, but Digg says it is "interested in exploring" the option.

Newsrooms display an activity feed showing Diggs and buries by individual users in the newsroom. They also implement the Newswire, released in August, which surfaces more stories and user activity. Digg has gone all in with the complete overhaul it launched last year to make Digg more social, despite user uprisings and declining traffic influence. Newsrooms are part of the effort to double down. Can Digg pull it off?

Digg, the social news site that was once the darling of tech-loving web users everywhere, has faced a rapid decline in interest as the rest of the Web grew up and it remained relatively slow and impersonal.

Today the site added a big new feature it thinks could help: a highly customizable, real time Newswire. Want to see the freshest videos about technology that have been validated enough to get 10 or more Diggs but aren't so popular that they've been dugg more than 50 times? Text posts about business with more than 50 Diggs? Those kinds of views are now easy to set up and read in real time. That's just one of several several big new features that went live on the site this morning.

Digg is expanding the way in which its notifications work, in order to help users keep better track of what's happening on the site. The update has two components: additional email notification options and the ability to receive on-site notifications.

The email notifications will now give you more information about the people you follow, specifically when they comment or Digg a story you've already taken action on. And the on-site notifications will give a little broadcast icon next to your profile image. Clicking on the icon will give you a drop-down with the five most recent notifications.

One of the issues Digg has always struggled with is that it can take quite a while before a breaking news story hits the front page. Waiting for enough users to vote a story up can sometimes take a few hours and in this age of real-time breaking news, Digg's lag doesn't make it an attractive destination for news junkies. Now, Digg is trying to change this by adding an editorial layer to some parts of the site. Starting today, Digg will add a breaking news/interesting stories module that will be managed and curated by Digg's community team. This team will aggregate stories that they think should be on the Digg front page but haven't garnered enough votes by the community yet.

Guest author Donald Draper is an occasional contributor to ReadWriteWeb.

Recently, I ended a long relationship with Digg.com. And I'm relieved.

For a time, Digg was glorious. For sharing great content, it was the only game in town, and it felt like the future. And whenever outside forces threatened its existence, fears were quickly squashed with reassurances and shows of support from Mr. Kevin Rose. Most of you will remember the infamous Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. Those days, Digg was shaping the future of the Web.

Rose once said, "We'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company." But a "bigger company" turned out to be the least of its problems.