sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged with Digg + news
socialmedian Launches First Major Upgrade
socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception.
First off, the new socialmedian will make it easier for users to get content onto the site and enable bloggers to better promote their content. Dubbed “News-Streaming,” socialmedian’s latest foray into bringing only certain content to its users is quite complex.
News-Streaming lets users filter out all the junk from the social media that they broadcast through the site. According to the company, if users want to share their Twitter feed with the community, but only want their tweets that are actually newsworthy to be collected by socialmedian, they can first input their Twitter feed and next to that, place certain keywords into the field to help the service filter out the tweets that the user doesn’t want posted. In other words, if you want to only post your political tweets to socialmedian, add your Twitter feed to the service and select keywords that may have some relevance to politics. From there, socialmedian will grab all tweets containing those keywords and post it to the site. The same goes for Google Reader feeds, Digg submissions, and Delicious bookmarks, to name a few.
To make sure all that information isn’t annoying other users, socialmedian is adding a filter feature that will let other users “turn the volume up or down” on the amount of tweets and stories making their way across the pages. Those users can choose to see all updates or only those “relevant updates” that they preset.
Part two of socialmedian’s new initiative will make it easier for bloggers to promote their material. In order to do that, socialmedian will launch a “reverse-blog widget,” which after users place their blog feed into their updates, will be featured in the clips section to the right of the socialmedian page and display the latest stories from the blog.
Taking a page out of the Digg handbook, socialmedian is also offering a page displaying the most popular stories of the day, week, and month. Instead of calling newer stories “Upcoming,” like Digg, socialmedian has two new entries called “Rising Fast” and “Hot Discussions.” Genius.
Finally, socialmedian opened up its site to make almost every page available to search engines and users won’t need to register any longer to view different pages on the site.
All in all, socialmedian’s updates seem rather logical and don’t really break the mold in any way. The site was in desperate need of improvement and it looks like it has finally happened. Now we’ll need to wait and see if its users embrace it.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
DiggLicious.com - a cool blend of digg.com and del.icio.us
Why Facebook Connect Matters & Why It Will Win
Facebook kicked off their second annual developer conference in San Francisco this afternoon with a keynote by founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The overproduced keynote, with too many words repeatedly incessantly, seemed like a lullaby sung by a nanny in a language alien to yours. There were some who compared Mark with Steve Jobs after last year’s presentation. Now, having watched the two weave their respective spells, I would say the comparison would be as exaggerated as equating the thespian abilities of Colin Ferrell with those of George Clooney.
These non-important and highly personal observations aside, I came away fairly impressed with what Mark & Company are doing with their Facebook Connect (FC) system. (The program launched today with 24 partners, and a press release. It will go into beta soon.) As a caveat, there is very little information available on how FC is going to work “technically.” Still, It seems Facebook has a much better chance of succeeding where Microsoft and othesr have failed. FC’s integration into services of partners like Digg and Six Apart makes it very clear that it is more than just a simple web ID system play.
In addition to offering a simple authentication method, FC allows granular social interactions to be embedded in non-Facebook services. If Facebook can work with its partners to build interesting use-case scenarios that go beyond simple sign-on, it is quite feasible that Facebook can out-execute Google, MySpace and everyone else with its ID ambitions.
Why? Because this is their one chance of building a monetization engine. The company makes no bones about trying to build a platform that allows it to offer branded advertising in a manner akin to Google’s Adsense. A simpler person (like yours truly) would call this a platform that serves ads for all occasions, reasons and seasons.
As I pointed out yesterday, Facebook Connect is the second iteration of the Beacon system and seems to be much less draconian and evil than the first version. Of course, it has been improved enough to become the underpinning of a highly effective advertising platform.
When you use Facebook Connect on a web service outside of Facebook, say Digg or Xobni, you are transmitting back “a little something about you” to the proverbial Facebook brain. I will use the example of the service built by Six Apart to illustrate my point.
If you visit a blog that is published using Six Apart’s Movable Type publishing system, you can leave a comment by using Facebook Connect for authentication of your ID. Your comment on a blog post can also be published to your Facebook account. This is fairly standard ID stuff.
However, it is the act of leaving a comment that is more important. You are essentially telling Facebook’s proverbial brain what topics — blogs or specific posts — with which you like to engage. In other words, you just told the system a little bit about yourself. Now imagine such information coming from dozens of Facebook Connect partners.
Each service adds a few more data points about you inside the Facebook brain, which is quite aware of your activities inside the Facebook ecosystem. The brain can then crunch all that information and build a fairly accurate image of who you are, what you like and what might interest you. With all that information at its disposal, Facebook can build a fairly large cash register.
In comparison with the Beacon system, this is almost benign. Beacon drew scorn & spit and my personal disdain, mostly because it sought to make commercial gains by compromising people’s privacy without giving them any choice. In comparison, the new system asks you to make a choice. By signing in to partner sites using the Facebook identity system, you are essentially saying yes and plugging into the Facebook brain. (I hope that Facebook and its partners learned from the mistakes of the past and make it very clear to their users how the system is going to work, and how their privacy/personal information will be used.)
At the post-keynote press confab (I skipped since I had to go see my doctor), when asked how the company will make money, Mark apparently said the company isn’t currently focused on monetization and will be looking to extend their platform’s reach. He doesn’t have to - if Facebook Connect works, the money will follow.
slinkset.com: share -> vote -> comment
Colivia / Top Nachrichten
twitigg.com : Recently Submitted URL & stories on twitter.com
community
communication
tools
searchengine
news
digg
journalism
Social Bookmarking
Pligg it! / Veröffentlichte News
Digg Changes Algorithm: No More Group Voting Up Stories
Digg Has Super Users Or Hates Ron Paul
One tin foil hat post in 24 hours isn’t enough. 
On January 16 (yesterday as I post this) I wrote about about Paypal suspending the account of a Ron Paul supporters group, effectively stopping Paul’s supporters paying for a recount in New Hampshire. The good news (for Paul supporters anyway) is that the authorities granted an extension and a supporter stepped forward and provided the money required in time (the original funds remaining frozen by Paypal).
But here’s the possibly bad thing: either Digg has super users who can single handedly bury stories on Digg, or they’re censoring Ron Paul posts.
I just happened to be reading on Twitter about a service called the “Ajaxonomy Bury Recorder (ABR)” a service launched last year that allows you to see the the number of buries on a Digg story by the time of each bury, the reason and at what stage in the voting process it was buried. Thinking that the Ron Paul story might get a few votes, I decided to run it in ABR through out the afternoon to see what might happen.
At exactly 43 votes the story received one bury for spam, and then it completely disappeared from the upcoming sidebar at Digg in its particular category. I ran a search for TechCrunch posts (newest via URL) on Digg to see whether it was there; nothing, clicked the include buried stories post: bingo, the post appeared in the list.
There have been rumors and suggestions that certain users at Digg have “special powers” in the past, so what I saw could simply be one of those users who can alone bury stories submitted to Digg, at any stage of the voting process. Or (with tin foil hat on) Digg might have decided to ban Ron Paul. There’s zero way of knowing, and Digg never talks about its internal workings so we have no way of finding out which one it is, or even if it’s a combination of both. I wonder how long it will take for someone on Digg to bury this post? Thank god for Reddit, eh 
Update: Pronet noticed that Digg itself buried stories back in May 2007.
cb_widget_report_widget("cb_widget_1200625919"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_0_1200625919","digg");
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Pligg Content Management System
Pligg Content Management System
RANKALO.net / News pubblicate
Who Spams Digg the Most
On the heels of the recently launched Techmeme Leaderboard, Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm has cobbled together an unofficial list of sites that have the most Digg juice. The ranking is based on Google’s site search (how many results come back for a search of “site:digg.com arstechnica.com,” for instance, a site which happens to be No. 4 on both lists). The sites with the most links on Digg rank highest.
The No. 1 site is YouTube, followed by Yahoo and Google. No surprises there. Only three blogs make it into the top ten (Ars Technica, Engadget, and Gizmodo). The rest are major news sites (BBC, Wired, CNN) and Wikipedia. TechCrunch is No. 41 on BlogStorm’s Digg list.
The problem with this Digg Leaderboard is that it doesn’t filter out anything. It would be useful to know, for instance, which sites get linked to on Digg’s homepage the most, or on the front page of each of its topic sections. (Kevin Rose, are you reading this?) But this list doesn’t do that. Instead, it counts any link on Digg, even deep in the member comments. Since so many blogs and sites constantly put up their own stuff on Digg and actively campaign to get those links on Digg’s homepage, you’ve got to wonder how that impacts these rankings. Any Digg Leaderboard, for that matter, would be particularly susceptible to such spamming campaigns.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
