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.
Digg Company Blog
