ReadWriteWeb

Mixx.com is a social news site that seems to have everything going for it. It's got more and better features than Digg, it's been integrated into the websites of a healthy list of huge mainstream media properties and, for the developers out there, it's got one of the most interesting APIs available today.

For some reason, though, it doesn't have much traffic. Mixx will issue a report tomorrow summarizing progress since work began on the site one year ago. The company is releasing traffic stats that show a nearly 3X increase in visitors in May. The surprise after all this good news? Fewer than 1 million people visited Mixx last month, less than 5% of the traffic that competitor Digg saw. Given the circumstances, Mixx's glaring lack of success to date calls a number of things about this industry into question.

MediaDefender is a company that acts on behalf of other media companies to muck up P2P and file sharing networks. They're the ones seeding BitTorrent with fake files - a tactic they hope will make filesharing appear to be too much of a hassle and therefore not worth the effort. In September of last year, MediaDefender was in the news for some leaked emails which helped The Pirate Bay prove that the company had hired professional hackers and saboteurs to bring down the world-famous file-trading site. Now, it seems MediaDefender is at it again. This time their target was Revision3, home to popular shows like Diggnation, Tekzilla, Systm, and The GigaOm Show.

Last week, computer book publisher SitePoint relayed a story about recent experiences with Digg that demonstrates that the Digg system is far from perfect. We've written recently on ReadWriteWeb about the decline and fall of quality on Digg, but SitePoint's anecdote demonstrates that sometimes the wisdom of crowds approach is, well, kind of dumb. Now is probably a good time to revisit the rules for harnessing the wisdom of the crowds we published on this blog a year ago.

Andrew Sorcini lives in Los Angeles, works as an animator for Disney and is the most powerful user that social news site Digg.com has ever seen. Known at Digg and elsewhere as MrBabyMan, Sorcini has submitted a site-leading 2,400+ stories that have hit the site's coveted front page. Those front page submissions have delivered an estimated 50 million pageviews to the sites the submissions came from. A good number of those submissions have been RWW articles, and we appreciate that.

Digg is in big trouble. We already know that Yahoo! Buzz, a beta social news service by Yahoo!, can drive a large amount of traffic and comments to websites. We also know the ongoing problems at competitor digg, which continue to be skated around by digg management. Now we have proof that Yahoo! Buzz is kicking some digg behind in terms of stats. According to a new report from comScore, in April Yahoo! Buzz for the first time did more traffic than digg - Buzz got nearly 7 million U.S. unique visitors in April, a 74% growth over March. What's more, about 51% of Yahoo! Buzz users are women, compared to just 39% women for digg. We have graphs below from comScore...

Last night was the second Digg Townhall, a live session hosted online by Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson. Like before, Kevin asked Digg users to post their suggestions on Digg as to what topics should be covered. (The thread is here). Now that the event is over, we can review how well those questions were addressed.

Yesterday, on Digg the Blog, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced the next Townhall, scheduled for Monday, May 12th at 8 PM EDT/5 PM PDT. Like the last one (our coverage), this Townhall will also be a virtual meeting held as a live webcast and made available for download afterwards.

Last night ReadWriteWeb got its first link on the Yahoo homepage, thanks to Yahoo Buzz - the beta social news service that is letting blogs get coverage on the world's most trafficked website. Our initial turn on yahoo.com happened late at night, 10pm PST, and lasted around 3.5 hours. It happened to our post about Wikipedia getting a print version. The verdict? While it didn't result in the avalanche of traffic that other publishers have reported, it still sent 45,000 page views to RWW in 3.5 hours outside prime time and where our link was the bottom-right of 4 links. That is more than a typical prime time digg or slashdot homepager. But what surprised us the most was the number of comments that Yahoo visitors left!

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side: this week we took a look at our readers' favorite web apps, we covered the social news space in depth (including posts on digg, Mixx and a new app called BlogRize), we brought you the latest news from Facebook, Adobe and YouTube. On the trends side: Bernard Lunn wrote a 'must read' 3-part series on the new Web, we analyzed Tim O'Reilly's recent call for 'big ideas' on the Web, we celebrated RSS Day, and we interviewed a top Microsoft exec about Live Mesh.

You may have heard of Greasemonkey, the Firefox extension that lets you customize the way a web page displays using small bits of Javascript, but are you using it to its fullest potential? There are hundreds of scripts available for installation from userscripts.org, so it can be difficult to know which ones are must-haves.