Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there.
How does it work? Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage. Here’s an example of what a Digg Trend might look like:
The goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not. We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible. As always, we plan to iterate based on your feedback and suggestions. So, please – tell us what you think.
I’m excited to announce that our next Digg Dialogg guest is none other than skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. From today until next Tuesday, October 27th at noon PT you can submit and Digg questions that you’d like to hear him answer. As a the world’s most acclaimed skateboarder, self-admitted tech geek, not to mention the creator of one of the most popular video game franchises of all time, I’m sure there will be no shortage of questions for me to ask him on your behalf.
In case you haven’t yet caught one of our Dialoggs, the concept is simple: We let you submit and vote on the questions you want to hear asked, and the most popular ones are asked during the video interview. Recent guests have included Matt Damon direct from the Toronto International Film Festival and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. You can see all of the Dialoggs here.
Submit and vote on your favorite questions you’d like to see answered; we’ll be posting the full interview on Monday, November 2nd.
As some of you may have read overnight, Digg and WeFollow (a Twitter directory where users can add themselves under a specific category) will now be more closely linked as we experiment with user influence as it applies to the Twitter universe.
Over the last four years we’ve been continually evolving our (real-time) user influence calculations at Digg. Behind the scenes we track the types of stories you Digg, when you dugg something pre or post homepage promotion, and how your Digg influences others on the site. While not outwardly visible, many of these factors help us gauge when to put stories on the homepage or recommend them to others.
So what changes on Digg? Well, this won’t impact anything on Diggtoday, but user influence and the data we collect during this process will play an important role in upcoming versions of Digg.
In the spirit of testing different ways to make ads on Digg better (similar to what we’re doing with Digg Ads), we’re launching some new ads today called Digg Content Ads and we’d love your feedback. These ads are in limited release so only a small percentage of folks on Digg will currently see them. We’ll be rolling out additional ads in the coming weeks.
Digg Content Ads are basically widgets that contain previous Digg homepage stories that are relevant to the industry or company that is advertising on Digg. For example, Symantec is testing the model with banners that pull in popular security-technology stories from the Digg archive:
At Digg, we think ads will feel more relevant (and thus work better for brands) if they feature the kind of content we look for online. One way to do this – one that’s very native to the Digg experience – is to encourage advertisers to re-aggregate stories that have already been popular on Digg. The stories might be about a brand’s products or services, or they might be stories of general interest to that brand’s customers.
Also, it’s important to point out that advertisers cannot promote stories that haven’t already been promoted to Digg’s homepage organically. However, if the stories have passed the age of promotion eligibility, they may be featured in a content ad even if they were never promoted. In other words, Digg Content Ads allow advertisers to re-publish existing stories into ad banners, and give those stories additional exposure within paid media; but they can’t use this approach to artificially boost a story onto Digg’s homepage.
As always, this is a work in progress and we will iterate based on feedback from the Digg community.
At the end of this month Jeffrey Kalmikoff is taking the design helm at Digg as our new director of design and user experience. Jeffrey will be leading all aspects of user experience and interface design at Digg. He’s a stellar designer and leader, who until recently was chief creative officer at Threadless and SkinnyCorp. I’m thrilled to be placing Digg in such good hands as I pursue a new project. I’ll continue to remain very involved with Digg as a frequent advisor and design consultant (and of course as a user!).
In October, I will be joining my friends Cal Henderson and Stewart Butterfield (and several other ex-Flickr folks) building a game under the company name Tiny Speck. Sign up over at TinySpeck.com to learn more. I’m excited to be digging (heh heh) into a fresh project with new and exciting challenges but it’s bittersweet to be stepping away from Digg.
Over the course of the past four and a half years that I’ve been working Digg, it has undergone many changes and we’re extremely grateful to all of you who’ve helped shape the site through your participation, feedback, and passion. I take with me so many great memories and experiences from my time here. We have some great ideas currently under development and I know Jeffrey and his team will infuse them with much awesome.
Jeffrey has very strong experience designing a thriving community-driven website. You are the ones who make Digg tick and I am very confident that Jeffrey will be able to support you with Digg’s design. He’ll be looking for your feedback to design the future of Digg and I’m sure you won’t be shy in offering it to him!
My hat goes off to you, Digg readers, participants, and fans! Please join me in welcoming Jeffrey to the Digg family and thank you for everything. Daniel (Digg, Twitter)
In true Digg Dialogg fashion, we’re mixing things up once again with our next guest, Oscar-winning actor, Matt Damon. Michael Phillips, the film critic of The Chicago Tribune and co-host of “At the Movies”, will be interviewing him at the Toronto International Film Festival where Damon is debuting his upcoming film, The Informant!
Matt Damon is best known for writing and starring in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting. He has also starred in films such as Saving Private Ryan, the Oceans series, the Bourne series, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, among others. And his latest film, The Informant!, will be released on September 18, 2009.
Besides his achievements in cinema, he is active in philanthropy, including H20 Africa Foundation and Water.org. Some of you will remember him being named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2007.
In case you’ve missed previous Digg Dialoggs, the program gives you the opportunity to submit and Digg questions that we then pose to influential leaders in their field. Check out some of our past interviews here. They include Al Gore, Trent Reznor, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Branson, to name a few.
Submit and vote on your favorite questions for Matt Damon on the Digg Dialogg page from now until Friday, September 11th at Noon PT; we’ll be posting the full interview on Tuesday, September 15th.
It’s time for our next Digg Townhall. We’ll be hosting it live this Thursday, August 13th at 5pm PT/8pm ET. With last week’s beta release of Digg Ads, along with changes to the DiggBar, the API and comment replies, we’re sure you will have some great questions for us.
Submit and Digg up questions you’d like Jay and I to answer, and we’ll address the most popular ones live on the Townhall. As always, we’ll post the video on the Townhall page shortly thereafter.
As announced earlier this summer, I’m excited to let you all know that we’re rolling out an early beta version of Digg Ads.
A recap of how it works: your Diggs, buries and clicks influence a quality score that determines how often the ad gets displayed, and ultimately how much the advertiser pays per click. The more you Digg an ad, the less the advertiser will have to pay; the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, eventually pricing it out of the system. The success of this system depends on your participation and feedback, as it will help advertisers to create the best possible experience for the Digg community. Our goal with Digg Ads is to encourage advertisers to create content as compelling as organic Digg stories, and to give you more control over which ads you see on Digg.
Over the next few days, some of you will see Digg Ads appear in rotation in various placements throughout Digg. The ads will look and feel similar to the Digg content you see everyday – stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – but will be clearly marked as sponsored.
We’re rolling Digg Ads out initially to small sets of users to help us test the product, so in the early stages many of you will not see them. We will continually iterate the product based on input from the community and our advertising partners. These changes will be rolled out over the course of the next several months, so expect to hear from us frequently on this topic as we work to create more compelling and innovative ads on Digg.
We’re excited to announce our next Digg Dialogg guest, technology luminary Marissa Mayer from Google. Marissa joined Google as their first female engineer in 1999 and was among the first 20 employees. She is currently their Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and has been responsible for leading & developing products including Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth and iGoogle. Fortune magazine recently named Marissa as one of the 50 most powerful women in the world.
From now until Friday, July24th at 12:00pm PDT, you can submit & Digg questions that you’d like to hear answered. Kevin will be conducting the interview, and with the recent buzz about the launch of the new Google Chrome OS, we think this should be a great discussion.
In case you’ve missed previous Digg Dialoggs, you have the opportunity to submit and Digg questions that we then pose to influential leaders and luminaries. Check out some of the past ones on the page, including Al Gore, Trent Reznor, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Branson.
Submit and vote on your favorite questions on the Digg Dialogg page from now until Friday at Noon PDT; we’ll be posting the full interview on Wednesday, July 29th at Noon PDT.
I wanted to clear up some confusion created over the past couple of days surrounding the DiggBar, specifically how Digg short URLs work. As we’ve stated in the past, the DiggBar is meant to streamline the Digg experience and provide our registered users with the opportunity to catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content. Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service.
Last week, we made a change that began directing non-logged in traffic generated from Digg short URLs to Digg story pages where they can view the comments and related content. In response to feedback, all short URLs that were generated *before* today will now behave as they did prior to last week’s change by taking the user directly to the source content. Logged-in Digg users will continue to be directed to the source content with the DiggBar (if they have it turned on). Of course, if the content has never been submitted to Digg, viewers will continue to be sent directly to the source.
As always, keep the feedback coming as we continue to think about ways to enhance the user experience and evolve the product.
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