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Content Tagged with User:alex + digg

I’ve written another of my little javascript web apps, this time based on Digg’s new expansive API.

The API is very well designed and I’ve only found a couple problems with it: the license is very restrictive and getting back some info requires many multiple calls to digg, but I guess it points to the problems with web apis as just being poor proxies for direct database calls.

The Digg application is a friends browser. – It basically asks the question: “Who’s digging you”.

I wrote this script because i’ve noticed that the front page of Digg is guarded by social networks of people who digg each other’s stories. If you want to get your story noticed, you want to have digg friends.

Enter any top digger name, you will see a high ratio of repeat diggers – the same is true of my submissions as well (Thanks Pawfoots!).

As I wrote it, I was interested really in just browsing around the networks, so I thought that was fun enough for an app. It’s kind of like an earlier script I wrote: delimages.

Anyways my app started with a single function basically that gives you back a digg response object with what you want. If you write a Digg script, you can use my little Digg function:

var Digg = 
{
    apikey : 'http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/'
};

Digg.request = function (path, count, cbkName, offset)
{
    var url = 'http://services.digg.com/' + path;

    if (!offset) offset = 0; 

    var params = $H(
    {
        'count'    :  count, 
        'type'     : 'javascript', 
        'appkey'   :  Digg.apikey, 
        'callback' :  cbkName,
        'offset'   :  offset
    });

    url += '?' + params.toQueryString();

    var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    var request = document.createElement('script');
        request.type = 'text/javascript';
        request.src = url;

    head.appendChild(request);
}

All of these JSON Apis are really hurting my Javascript OOP sensibilities. XMLHttpRequest is cool with you making an anonymous function on the fly as the callback, but with JSON the best approach probably is having a callback name passed in the object return, which isn’t the cleanest.

I tried to make do in my script as best I could though.

It’s kind of a funny thing, other sites would kill for the kind of user contribution that Digg receives on an hourly basis. People are pretty devoted to the site. One thing I’ve been noticing recently is that some stories are being smuggled off into the night by Digg’s secret police.

One story I submitted the other day was a creative commons account of a switcher from Kubuntu to OSX. I, like a lot of other Apple converts, am interested in genuine switcher stories and I thought Digg’s Apple friendly crowd would be too. The story was pretty successful even, drawing in a digg every 5 minutes are so, and it soon made the homepage with 35 votes.

But pretty soon my story is gone. Gone from my submitted stories even. It’s still in my Digg Homepage stories

Somewhere I imagine my poor story doing hard labor in a Siberian work camp.

Anyways, I posted the full text of the article to SWiK (creative commons ftw) and pretty soon there were interesting comments on there.

I don’t really mind Digg’s longstanding policy of stealth banning stories. If you can’t play nicely with the group, go play by yourself, that seems like a good compromise. We use stealth bans on SWiK too to try and remove feedback from spammers. But pulling it out of my submitted stories altogether seems like overreaching. That’s my area. Don’t touch that, especially don’t kill good faith stuff I put in there.

Chrisek, a top 10 digger recently went through the same thing, posting info about a new web2.0 tagging site called ‘wis.dm’ – now buried and gone from his submissions too.

Eventually we’ll add a ‘democratic’ way to feature interesting projects on SWiK. Normally I’d study Digg as a model for how a great community site can function, but in this case I think they just annoy valuable submitters.

ok I thought this should have been on digg, but as is the case most of the time, no one agreed with me:

The Virgin Mary Appears in Second Life

I couldn’t bring myself to add an exclamation point, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single point in time when Digg didn’t have a front page story with an exclamation mark.

But I think it’s cool and I feel like posting it, so here’s the miracle of miracles:

See it? It’s the Virgin Mary!!!! Randomly rendered in a texture! It can be yours for only $30,000 Linden Dollars! ($100 US, must be a lot of inflation in SL)

Second Life in general is doing pretty well despite an aging graphics engine, check out this Google Trends graph of searches for Second Life:

Of course compare this to WoW:

Here’s a bookmarklet to submit a new story to digg.

I’ve been playing around with another weekend project, this time what I set out to build is something that will give me a ‘Digg This’ button that I can put on my website.

If you live under a rock and haven’t kept up with my blog posts on Digg, here’s what it’s about.

Let me explain what I mean by a digg button, after all there are ‘digg this’ generators out there already.

But all they do is put a little text link on my site that makes people go off to digg.com if they want to vote for my article.

That’s not what I want. I want the real McCoy, I want the actual real live digg button on my page. I want it to show the count of diggs. I want it to be clickable, and I definitely want to see the vote animation like on Digg.com.

I thought this might be a cool little javascript I could let other people use too, so I whipped up a simple little generator: you can make your own digg this buttons here.

It’s been reported before that Digg.com has surpassed Slashdot on Alexa, but never before in the main ‘reach’ metric—for the first time Digg beat Slashdot the other day.

Slashdot is a good example of why you should probably not rest on your laurels for years and years.

If you look a little deeper into these stats though, it’s clear that Digg’s audience isn’t completely comprised of Slashdot defectors, they have their own audience that’s somewhat distinct, and the style of the stories are different enough that there is room enough for both.

As great as it looks for Digg right now though, there are secondary statistics to reach and page views, like number of people ‘digging’, ranking comments, etc – the metric for how well these are doing is more obscure.

Social bookmarking is currently in a high growth pattern. I notice it all the time running LiveMarks, the rate of social bookmarking is increasing every single day.

The more people flock to something, the bigger target it is for abuse. The more people turn to del.icio.us to find useful bookmarks, or digg.com to read the latest news, the more tempting targets those services become for spammers and vandals.

As Clay Shirky has noted, “Social software is stuff that gets spammed.” Perhaps as an addendum to that aphorism it should be noted that successful social services are those that can resist spam successfully.

The spamming foes of social software are just starting to take shape. Witness a new service called ‘TagExplosion’, TagExplosion describes itself:

“[TagExplosion] helps get your program, blog, advertisement or website on the several “Social Bookmarking” sites so you can get on 100,000’s of computers, worldwide. This will help drive more traffic to your website by utilizing the “word-of-mouth” aspect of Social Bookmarking.

Services like these are bound to multiply and exploit every weakness in social bookmarking’s defenses against spam and general social filters such as Digg’s front-page promotion mechanism or del.icio.us’s popularity or aggregation filters.

At the moment, the defenses of the social bookmarking sites are fairly weak. Currently del.icio.us has certain filters that destroy obvious spammers, prevent excessive tagging from aggregating onto every tag page, and prune the front page’s new bookmarks list. But del.icio.us’ only solid defense against automated attack is their signup captcha. As we’ve seen with BlogSpot, a signup captcha is only worth what it costs a spammer to pay an Indian or Filipino company to fill in.

del.icio.us may soon have to contend with spammers that post automatically or through peer to peer schemes such as TagExplosion or hide their spam like steganographers, continuously studying filters to evade and manipulate them.

Digg has similar problems, and is currently using similar techniques with similar vulnerabilities. As Digg is a more socially oriented site, it also uses more socially oriented solutions to fight off the spam problem. Users are encouraged not to post duplicate stories by having to first wade through other users’ submissions, and once posted other users quickly respond and post complaintative comments against problematic links. Users of Digg also help fend off spam by reporting what is wrong to the administrators and to the other users watching the live queue.

As frequent Digg users are well aware, Digg has had a tough battle in the recent times fighting vandalism. So far however, only a tiny minority vandalize the site, spammers are still thankfully somewhat in the dark as to how they might abuse the system.

This is all very reminiscent of the rise of search engines, Compare a search on Altavista for viagra to the same search on Google. Search engines that failed, failed in large part because spammers eventually reverse engineered the algorithms they used to determine relevance and simply rearranged their pages to suit those algorithms. The top result for viagra: ‘t-e-x-a-s-poker.com’ on altavista is the end result of the eventual failure of the first generation algorithms.

It’s likely that to survive and remain useful, social services will have to follow in this mold and emulate Google by switching their filters to factors that are more expensive and more complicated to engineer, such as third party references, longevity, references from known trusted sources, and patterns of human created content. Or they may be forced to become less social, such as with Wikipedia’s recent policies. Even then, it’s certain to be an ongoing battle.