For more details about the 'Diggate' controversy, have a look at our earlier coverage of the DiggBar's implications with regards to SEO and copyright.

Lots of Activity on the DiggBar

Digg also announced that an astonishing 45% of all the activity on Digg is now happening on the DiggBar, and 25% of all DiggBar users are using the toolbar to discover new content by looking at related stories. According to John Quinn, only a very small number of Digg users have disabled the toolbar.

The below graph shows minutes spent on site. Once again it's sorry reading for digg, which is trending downwards while Buzz goes up.

Finally, here are charts showing that Buzz is almost identical to the mainstream men/women Internet split, while digg users are 61% men.

Reading through the comments, it appears that a lot of external (and even some internal?) diggs are being redirected to this page. As I write this, the story has 46 diggs and comments indicating 6 sites (not including Center Networks) that are apparently unknowingly sending diggers its way. The story is 348 days old, but the comments are all within the past couple of hours. Bug? Hack? Who knows... it sure is odd, though.

Does anyone have any info on this? Is this something you've seen before? Leave a comment below.

Update: Turns out it was a bug. From Digg programmer Steve Williams: "We're aware of this problem, and we're working on it. I believe the digg buttons are working correctly now, but we're still looking for the root cause. It wasn't a hack." (via the Digg page for this post)

Digg is partnering with CNN's iReport on this. Diggers will be able to either submit their questions in writing through the Dialogg page or they can upload a video to iReport. According to Digg, they will ask the top rated questions, but given the often rowdy nature of Digg, it will be interesting to see if the questions will be censored in any way and how the Digg users would react if that happened.

As Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced last week, Digg will have a substantial presence at the Democratic and the Republican conventions. Giving Digg's users at least some influence over the reporting from there falls right in place with Digg's overall style.

Not New - But Still a Good Thing

Overall, there is, of course, little that is new about this style of doing interviews, which is quite similar to the YouTube debates. Even Slashdot, Digg's virtual grandfather, often uses it to decide on interview question. At the same time though, anything to get young people interested in politics is a good thing in our opinion and Digg definitely has the ability to reach a lot of folks who would otherwise not be interested in the political process. Also, given that Digg, at its core, is still a technology site, its users are likely to ask a lot of tech oriented questions that a lot of the politicians probably never thought about much.

Looking at the top rated questions so far, net neutrality is ranking high above legalizing marijuana and repealing the Patriot Act.

Maybe one of the most interesting features of these sub-diggs will be that those users who manage them will be able to control how and when newly submitted stories will be promoted to the front page.

For Digg's competitors like Reddit and Mixx, the sub-sites have definitely been a success. At reddit, which is arguable a lot smaller than Digg, the more popular sub-reddits can have between 3000 to 20,000 subscribers.

As social news sites like Digg grow in popularity, a lot of their early, hardcore constituents can often feel pushed to the sidelines by the more mainstream users who start using the site over time. With these sub-sites, these users can still make the site their home and take control over their experience again.

To share stories, users can now hover over the 'share' link on the digg homepage and select the service they want to share the stories on (email, Facebook, or Twitter). Digg also removed the 'blog this' feature, which, according to Digg's Jen Burton only saw really low usage.

For a more detailed discussion of the pros and cons of shouts on Digg, please see our earlier report from last week.

Reddit may have a jump on Digg when it comes to avoiding groupthink and spam, via a user reputation system it calls 'karma'. Check out the full story on ZDNet and tell me what you think: is Reddit's karma system a better - more honest - way to rank stories and users than Digg's populist approach of ranking by homepage hits? Or do you think Digg has the right approach, but just needs to address the groupthink and spam issues that come with scaling to thousands of users?

On the 'Submit' page, it states:

"Cost: $20, plus $1 per Digg.

After completing the form below, you will be taken to PayPal. Once your PayPal payment is received, your Digg submission will be given to User/Submitter users to promote on Digg.com.

User/Submitter users are then given the chance to digg your submission and other stories for $0.50. After your submission has reached your desired number of diggs, you will be emailed a report.

We cannot guarantee that your submissions will hit the front page of Digg. We reserve the right to reject or cancel any submission for any reason.

If User/Submitter is unable to fulfill your requested number of verified diggs within 48 hours, you will be refunded the amount of Diggs paid for but not received within 5 working days.

All User/Submitter transactions are private."

And on the 'User' page it has a registration form, plus a note: "Pay-out: $0.50 per Digg."

No word on how many users they have right now, but looks like it set up shop just recently. I seriously doubt it will work anyway.

If we compare this data though to official registered user stats from digg and Facebook, the story is very different. When Facebook announced their platform, it was revealed that they have 24 million "active" users. The most recent digg stats I could find were from a Kevin Rose blog post on 7 March 2007, in which he announced that Digg had just reached one million registered users. So while the Facebook data seems to correlate with Compete (approximately 1 unique visitor for each registered user), digg's data is much different. If Compete's data is accurate, then that means there are 22 unique visitors to each registered digg user. Which suggests that by far the majority of digg's users are not registered users.

Also, if you look at the growth patterns according to Compete's data, it is quite extraordinary:

Source: Compete

I find it all hard to believe - not only that digg has 22 Million monthly unique visitors, but also that they have more monthly unique visitors than Facebook. digg is still a very techie user base, whereas Facebook is seemingly far more mainstream. Or is it?

The above graph says that digg grew 1400% in unique visitors over the past year. That is hard data - and if we accept it is true, then the conclusion is that digg has succeeded in going mainstream. Remember that was digg's stated aim when it expanded beyond Technology stories in June 2006. Yes, one year ago. So has digg actually grown by 1400% in a year, since it expanded its content focus beyond tech? The Compete data suggests it has.

What do you make of this data? Is digg really more popular than Facebook?

It needs to be said, though, that Facebook's user base has exploded over the last year, while Digg's traffic 'only' grew by about 50% according to Compete. During its fifth year, Facebook's traffic more than doubled from about 28 million visitors to over 73 million.

As Jay Meattle points out in his guest post for Compete, Digg will have to come up with something very special if it wants to continue to match Facebook's growth.

Can Digg Become Mainstream?

In a way, though, comparing Digg to Facebook isn't even necessarily fair, as they provide two completely different services, but in terms of the users they want to reach, both have very similar aspirations. For now, Digg, however, hasn't been able to break into the mainstream (even though Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon last week), while there is a good chance that even your mother is now joining Facebook. If Digg wants to continue its growth, it will have to find a way to attract more mainstream users without alienating its base.

With these changes, the strength of using the available search result-generated RSS feeds has also improved. Now, you have greater flexibility to get just the items you are interested in from in a search result, and consequently, in your feed reader. If you are an information junkie like we are, you know that leveraging some time getting the perfect search result locked in to an RSS feed is huge, and it can make the difference between continuously sifting through noise and every story being one that is important to you.

Frankly, we think Digg's work on search is simply tremendous. Although it does not rely on search to remain immensely popular, its now leverages that popularity to return results that are relevant and useful sliced any number of different ways. A great job on a core part of Digg's infrastructure that has been overlooked for too long.

According to Wikipedia (a site Stern specifically cites as an example of UGC), user generated content "refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users." Wikipedia lists discussion boards as a type of UGC site (it even lists Digg as an example of a user generated content web site). Digg's comments act in very much the same way as a discussion board -- encouraging people to comment on news stories, videos, and images (very often leading to more comments than are made on the original source article).

Stern's objection to Digg being a user generated content site seems to focus around the word "content" -- as Stern argues, much of the submitted content is unorginal. But the comments on Digg, no matter how useless some might find them, are original media content provided by the users for publication on Digg -- which is enough to fit the Wikipedia definition, at least (and this is why we might say the comments section on any media site are an example of user generated content). In some cases, Digg provides utility for users to respond to content that doesn't allow commenting at the original source (i.e., many mainstream news articles). These responses qualify as user generated content in my opinion.

But even if you agree with Stern that Digg is light on user generated content (and there is certainly a case to be made there), there is no denying that Digg is a user generated site. Digg has very little -- if any -- editorial oversight, and the content on the site is dictated by users. As the HD DVD crack episode last May showed us, Digg may not have much control over its users do with the site's content at all.

That said, while I think it is fine to call Digg a user generated content site, I see Stern's point. When you say "user generated content" you think of YouTube or Wikipedia before you think of Digg -- i.e., the sites that immediately come to mind are those where there is a major creative element to the content being contributed by users. But if Digg isn't a user generated content site, it is certainly a user something site. So how about this: user managed content site. (You can even drop the word "content" if you'd like.)

What do you think? Is Digg a user generated content site? Let us know in the comments below.

Harrison created a series of ring graphics showing all stories, as well as breaking them down by month and day (above). He also made rings using the entire set of Digg historical data going back to December 1, 2004. I won't try to guess what trends one might be able to identify from looking at the Digg Rings (though the above graphic seems to indicate more site volume on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday), but the results are simply gorgeous. Certainly one of the coolest Digg visualizations we've seen. You can download full PDFs of the rings at Harrison's site. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/visualizing_digg_tree_rings.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/visualizing_digg_tree_rings.php Visualization Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0800 Josh Catone

And we have a bookmarklet that makes it even better!

In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see some comments directly from the toolbar, though this is currently restricted to the latest, most controversial, and the most popular comments.

How to Get It

If you want to see the DiggBar in action, all you have to do is enter "digg.com/" in front of any URL, and the toolbar will automatically appear at the top of the page. Or, you can use our own DiggBar bookmarklet. Instructions for setting it up are at the end of this post.

More Features

The toolbar also features a prominent 'Random' button, that will, as the name implies, take you to a random page with a similar story that was popular on Digg in the last few days. This, of course, is very similar to what StumbleUpon does.

All of this, of course, will help to make Digg an even stickier site, as users will never quite leave the Digg experience behind, but at the same time, as MG Siegler points out on VentureBeat, this also shifts Digg's focus away from its own site, and turns Digg into a service.

No DiggBar Bookmarklet? No Problem - We Have One For You!

Sadly, Digg didn't provide users with a bookmarklet that would make it easy to quickly invoke the DiggBar without having to edit the URL, but our own Rick Turoczy just wrote up a bookmarklet for us - you just have to drag and drop this link to your bookmarks: digg bar.

After that, clicking on the link will invoke the DiggBar for any site you are currently visiting.

I can add my own bit of analysis to Allen's. At the end of last week I did a check of which tech publishers were getting the most frontpages.

Number of digg frontpages in last 30 days:
Ars Technica = 87
Gizmodo = 84
Engadget = 67
Torrentfreak = 36
Techcrunch = 12
Valleywag = 9
ReadWriteWeb = 6
Mashable = 4
Gigaom = 4
VentureBeat = 2
CenterNetworks = 1

As you can see, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Engadget get far more frontpages than other top tech blogs like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Allen's own CenterNetworks. Ars gets on average 3 frontpages a day - in other words, they get as many frontpages in 2 days as we get in a month. Yet on Technorati's list of top blogs, only 7 places separates Ars (#7) from RWW (#14). I'm not complaining (much), it's just the way this business works. But it is interesting that digg, which is a social news site and famously runs without using editors, is dominated by such a small collection of top blogs. And that select group appears to be getting smaller and more exclusive by the day.

Don't get me wrong, Slashdot has its own biases - it almost always chooses to link to stories from a traditional 'old media' source, rather than blogs. So it too no doubt has a small collection of sources that dominate its frontpage.

My point (other than indulging myself in 'shop talk') is that at the same time that Digg is becoming more mainstream, the variety of its sources for top news has dropped. Is this a good thing? Obviously not for some of us tech blogs. But I'd argue it's also not good for digg readers, who are not getting the diversity of tech stories they used to get.