Digg Blog

New Digg Blog

2006-10-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

We've just redesigned the Digg blog. Unfortunately, this means you'll have to update your RSS feeds. Thanks for your understanding.

Can't see the new blog yet? It'll take a few hours for the DNS to propagate everywhere, so you might not see it right away or you might get a "Page Not Found" error. Be patient, you'll see it soon!

My #1 Feature Gets Small Update

2006-10-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

We rolled out a few bug fixes this morning along with a small feature update to 'My #1'.

What's new:
You can now remove your previously marked #1 stories using the 'Remove My #1' link under each saved story in your profile. We now also display which stories your friends currently have marked as #1 under your 'My Friends' tab.

More coming soon - digg on,

Kevin

Digg Adds New 'My #1 Story' Feature

2006-09-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

Now you can showcase and separately store your favorite digg stories by using the new "My #1 Story" feature. Starting today, every time you digg a story an icon will appear next to the story title.

Clicking the icon will save and lock that story to the top of your digg user profile. This will let your friends know what you consider to be the most important story on digg at any given time. These #1 stories are also saved in a separate "My #1" archive that keeps a chronological record of all your previous favorites. Think of it as your bin for just your absolute favorite digg stories.

Enjoy!

Kevin

More on Digg Friends

2006-09-11T15:46:00.000-07:00

Hi all -

I just wanted to post real quick to clarify a couple of points on my last blog entry on some of the changes we're making in the near future.

Last week there were several stories accusing some of our users of gaming digg by digging each others' stories. The intention of the post absolutely wasn’t to point a finger at any individual or group. It was intended to openly highlight some of the things we’re doing to keep digg as useful, democratic, and devoid of misuse as possible.

To set the record straight, we appreciate everything our long-established digg users have done to help build this community. There is nothing wrong with digging your friends' stories that you enjoy - in fact we encourage this activity through our friends features. It's our job at digg to ensure that stories are promoted based on a diverse pool of diggers (not just friends) - this is something we have tweaked in the past and will continue to tweak going forward.

Thanks for listening,

Kevin

Digg Friends

2006-09-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

Over the last (almost) two years we have learned a lot about the user base and how to defend digg from spam, artificial diggs, and digg fraud. It's a battle we will continue to fight and one that we don't take lightly.

That said, today we read a couple blog posts that highlight users digging each others stories. This is something we encourage through our friends features and will continue to expand as digg evolves. It is our goal to create a platform in which you can share and promote news that is important to you. What is changing however is how we are handling story promotion. While we don't disclose exactly how story promotion works (to prevent gaming the system), I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn't mean that the story won't be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

Changes are coming to our top users page as well. In the near future you will see two tabs - 'Top Diggers' and 'Top Submitters'. Top diggers will be a ranked list of people that find/digg (not submit) stories that become popular. This list will also be sorted by how diverse the digger is - meaning if they digg stories from lots of different people and their stories become popular, they'll rank highly.

In the end digg is yours to control. No matter which stories are promoted, it's up to the masses to digg or bury them. If you see content you disagree with - bury it. If enough people do the same, the system will automatically remove the story.

More features and news coming soon!

Digg on,

Kevin

Great news for digg!

2006-08-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

Digg has reached the 500,000th registered user mark! We continue to grow at a phenomenal rate and we owe it to all 500,000+ of you for digging GREAT stories. As of 2:30pm PST digg has 511,136 registered users. We can't thank you enough, and we look forward to announcing our one millionth user registration sometime in the future.

digg on,

Dan

Digg's Eli White Releases PHP Book

2006-08-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

Congrats to digg developer Eli White for shipping his first book on PHP. The book is called 'PHP 5 in Practice'. Eli will also be giving several presentations on PHP development over the next few months:

PHP|works
Toronto
Sept 12th-15th
http://www.phparch.com/works

DCPHP
DC
Oct 18th-20th
http://dcphpconference.com/

Zend/PHP Con
San Jose
Oct 30th-Nov 2nd
http://zendcon06.kbconferences.com/

Go Eli!

Digg, trademarks, and confusion

2006-08-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

A while ago our trademark attorney approached us and was concerned we could lose the name 'digg'. I had no idea this was possible as we had already filed for the trademark. Apparently if you don't enforce the TM (meaning not let other sites use it), we run the chance of losing it... which would suck. The last thing we want is to lose our name.

So what to do...

We don't want to shut anyone down (not even the clone sites), all we ask is that you avoid using the name 'digg' in your website names/domains. We're looking to see if we have any other options.

Digg on,

Kevin

Video Thumbnails

2006-08-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

Starting today, all newly submitted videos from YouTube and Google will include static thumbnail previews. Support for Yahoo! videos is coming soon.

If you're a video hosting provider and would like digg to include thumbnail support for your videos, email us at support at digg.com, and we'll do our best to add you.

Enjoy,

Kevin

BusinessWeek Story

2006-08-08T23:12:00.001-07:00

Hi all - Kevin here,

Wow, crazy week. While we’re honored that BusinessWeek decided to choose digg as their focus and cover story - I just wanted to do a quick post to share some thoughts.

About the headline:
"How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months."
Outside of a regular paycheck, digg hasn’t 'made' me any money – I’m not a millionaire. I assume that their numbers were all based on estimates of the company’s worth.

About digg revenues:
“Digg is breaking even on an estimated $3 million annually in revenues.”
While digg will eventually turn a profit, we are currently not break even. Our philosophy from day one has always been to keep the site lightweight and not bombard users with annoying advertising – something that is very important to us.

As always, our focus is on building a platform that allows you to discover/share news and information in new and exciting ways. Expect to see some pretty amazing new features and tools in the coming months.

Digg on,

Kevin

Cloud Timestamps / Bug Fixes

2006-08-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

This morning we rolled out a couple dozen bug fixes and cloud view timestamps for all topics.

Digg on,

Kevin

Digg Labs Launches (alpha)

2006-07-24T12:28:00.000-07:00

labs.digg.com - A broader, deeper view of Digg

Digg moves very quickly, and has a great many stories submitted every day, so good material can sometimes fly by before you even know it. By providing broader and deeper views of activity on the site, the tools and projects in Labs aim to help manage the stream of stories passing through Digg, and to better understand the patterns and trends generated by our fast-growing membership. These interactive visualizations look beneath the surface of the Digg community's activities. The projects currently in Digg Labs are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. As the project matures, we'll be releasing a public API to allow outside developers access to this data.

Two New Tools - Stack & Swarm!

Stack

Digg Stack shows diggs occuring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. As stories are dugg, they appear along the bottom of the screen, colored according to how popular they are. Users digging these stories appear as falling blocks that stack up as activity increases. The zoom level is adjustable, so you can focus in on the most recent stories, or pull back for a broader overview. You can also pause the visualization if it's flying by too quickly, or if you want to focus on a specific story more readily.

Clicking on an individual item pulls up more information on that story — who dugg it, how many comments it has, etc. — as well as providing a sparkline-style graph that shows a more detailed hour-by-hour display of activity on that story.

Swarm

Digg Swarm is a more lyrical view of Digg. Stories come in as circles with the title inside of them, and diggers "swarm" around these stories when they digg them. Every time a story gets dugg, it increases in size — so the bigger the story, the more active it is. As people digg more stories, they move from circle to circle, and increase in size. You might see enormous diggers moving quickly from story to story; those seem to be people digging without taking the time to read stories...

Stories start off placed randomly on the screen, but as they get dugg, their positions change depending on who's digging them. Stories that are closer together are being dugg by the same users, and you can roll over stories to see these connections. The thicker the line, the more diggers in common that story has — which starts to suggest connections between stories over time. And selecting a story provides more detail about it.

Hope you enjoy, more to come soon.

Stamen

Integrating Digg Within Your Website

2006-07-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

With today's latest code push we have enabled two new methods for integrating digg directly within your website:

-Submit To Digg
The easiest way to get your articles on digg is to encourage your visitors to submit their favorite stories directly to digg. Up until this point many sites have linked directly to the URL submission page. While this works, it is now possible to take it one step further by pre-populating the submission form with a title, description, and topic.

Click here to download the URL submission specifications and icon pack.

-Digg Story Button
Once your story has been successfully submitted you can now display the number of diggs and allow users to digg your content directly by using the following syntax:

<script>
digg_url = 'URLOFSTORY';
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js"></script>

Expect to see further enhancements to both of these tools with the upcoming release of our API.

Digg on,

Kevin

Digg v3 Released To Public

2006-07-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

This morning we squashed the last of the major digg v3 bugs and pushed them live to the site. We want to thank all of the digg beta testers for your bugs reports and time spent testing. The beta flags have all been lifted and all containers are now released to the public.

Digg on!

Kevin

Digg v3 User Registation

2006-06-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a slight misunderstanding regarding user registration in digg v3. Just to clarify, digg and all of our containers/topics will be publicly viewable and will not require user registration. However, over the next week we will require user registration to access the new beta areas of the site. Once the bugs are squashed the beta status of the site will be lifted and everyone will be free to browse. The Technology section is completely open to all registered and non-registered users as it always has been.

Sorry for the confusion,

-Digg Staff

Digg v3 Status

2006-06-26T05:19:00.000-07:00

(5:00AM PST): Digg temporarily down while we switch over to Digg v3.0.
(6:10AM PST): Digg v3 is live.
(6:20AM PST): Demand is so high we're adding more machines.
(7:50AM PST): We are making a run to bestbuy to pick up some more servers (kidding). Seriously though: We are seeing much higher activity than we normally do, so bear with us as we turn on additional machines and tweak the site throughout the day.
(3:30PM PST): All is running fine. Digg on!

Digg connectivity issues.. round 2

2006-06-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

Digg was down due to metropolitan network issues that took down
several of digg's upstream network providers this morning. All is now fixed.

Last update: Friday, June 02, 2006 - 5:10 PM

Visualizing Digg Data

2006-05-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

In our ongoing effort to analyze digging patterns, news trends, story
connections/relationships, friend suggestions (future feature), and
digging bots/fraud, we'd like to share with you the first visual
maps/movies of actual digging activity.

How to read the map:

* The horizontal axis is users arranged by numeric ID. Lower IDs are at the left and vertical gray lines separate user's IDs by increments of 10,000. It's possible to see that users from across the spectrum participate in digg activity. There is very little skew towards newer users, which we had not expected. The spacing of the horizontal gray lines shows that the most recent stories are getting the most attention, which is what you'd expect.

* There are a few vertical strings of digging, showing individuals who have dugg a series of stories during a single hour. Note: Solid unbroken white lines may represent bot activity. This activity is much more apparent in the movies below.

* The vertical axis represents items arranged by numeric ID. Lower IDs are at the top, and horizontal gray lines separate item IDs by increments of 10,000. The bright horizontal lines are items dugg by a lot of users.

* Dots are sized and colored according to the type of digg that occurred. Red dots are first-time diggs, and represent an item's first appearance in Digg. These are clustered towards the bottom, and there aren't very many of them. Not everyone is a first-time digger.

Fat dots are diggs that took place before an item hit the front page. These are also clustered towards the bottom. The remaining small dots are diggs of front-page stories. The vast majority of activity confirms and strengthens existing items.

Movies (Quicktime required):
6-09AM 04/01/06
6-12PM 03/01/06 (Note the hard white line - potential bot activity)

While this data will be primarily used for internal research, the results will find their way into upcoming user tools and next generation digg promotion and spam detection algorithms. We also plan on launching an API after the next major release of digg (v3). The API will provide users with access to digg DB data in which you can build your own digg tools/research projects around.

Digg on,

Kevin

Digging Fraud

2006-04-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Recently it was brought to our attention that several users have created accounts to mass digg and promote stories. While these accounts appear to be valid, they have in certain instances been used for automated in-order (scripted) digging. This is a violation of our terms of service and the accounts have since been banned.

As you can imagine with over 250,000 registered users (and adding thousands more per week) we are constantly monitoring and looking for user SPAM/fraud. Internally, we have several methods for detecting fraud which results in DOZENS of banned accounts per day.

The banning of forevergeek.com: Aside from the dozens of user reports, several accounts were created to artificially inflate the digg count of their stories. When a single URL hits a threshold of reports, our standard procedure is to block that URL from submission (spam control). Again, mass fraud digging is in violation of our terms of service.

Missing stories: A common question we receive is the confusion surrounding missing stories. Once a story has received enough user reports it is automatically removed from the digg queue or homepage (depending on where the story is living at that time). The number of reports required varies depending on how many diggs the story has. This system is going to change in the near future. Shortly after the next major launch of digg (v3.1), reported stories will fall into a 'buried stories' bin. Users will have the ability to pick through this story bin and vote to have a story reinstated should they believe it was falsely reported. Expect to see this feature in the next few months.

On a personal note: It has been pointed out that I too have dugg these fraud stories. I digg stories I enjoy reading and currently track over 40 users within digg. If it's good content, I digg it.

Kevin

Friends in Clouds

2006-03-27T19:56:00.000-08:00

You can now see when friends have dugg a story in cloud view. Stories dugg by friends are displayed in green, and on mouse-over, digg displays a list of friends that have dugg the story.

Browse the cloud here.
No friends? Add me or find some here.

Digg on,

Kevin

Friends Tracking

2006-03-15T09:22:00.000-08:00

Logged in users will now have the ability to track their friend's activities directly on the homepage. You're now able to track stories dugg, commented on, submitted, and stories in the queue (unpromoted).

Have a digg account but no friends? Add me to test it out.
New to digg? Register here.

Kevin

Ads on Digg

2006-03-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

From the beginning it's always been our philosophy to put the focus on
news stories and site usability with ads on the side to support the
site. This is something we'll never change. The last thing we ever
want to see on digg is jumping monkeys or pop-ups. But we also realize
that with our current growth rate we need better advertisers in order
to survive. So three or four months ago we started looking at
companies that could assist us in placing quality (relevant!) sponsors
on digg. In our search we kept hearing about John Battelle's (Wired
magazine founder) new company 'Federated Media'. FM had built a
quality family of sites they represent (Boing Boing, Metafilter, 43
Folders, Om Malik's Broadband Blog, TechCrunch and others) and their
focus from day one has always been matching quality sponsors with
quality sites.

So we gave them a try. It's been almost two months later and we are
happy in that they have brought us such advertisers as
Hitachi, Palm, WebEX, Lenovo, and others.

So what's changing? Nothing. Same ad slots, just more quality
advertisers. But to keep the sponsors flowing we need your
help. FM has asked that we post this short anonymous survey so that
they can better pitch digg to great companies. If you have a minute
to fill it out - great! If you hate surveys and block ads anyway,
that's cool too.

-The Digg Crew

New Digg Comment System Released!

2006-03-01T01:36:00.000-08:00

We are pleased to announce the next version of digg comments. To see them in action, click here (quicktime video), or visit your favorite digg story. New features:

- Digg / Bury: Now each digg user has the ability to rate their favorite comments by digging them. If you see an off-topic comment, simply click the bury icon to shrink and remove the comment from view.

- Sorting: Our new sorting method allows you to quickly filter out comments below a certain digg threshold. Looking for just the best? Sort by 'most diggs.'

- Friends: If you see a green comment you know a friend has dugg or
posted it. Quickly scroll through hundreds of comments only stopping
for the ones your friends like.

- Block/Report User: If you find that a user is someone you don't want to read, you can filter out that user (site-wide) by clicking the block user button. With enough user blocks the offending user is reported to the digg abuse staff.

- Threads: To replay to an individual comment simply click the 'reply'. Your comment is now indented and positioned below the original post.

- Edit: You can now edit comments up to 3 minutes after you post them. Clicking transforms your post into an edit box.

If you find any bugs please sent them to support@digg.com - digg on!

Kevin

Digg comment system

2006-02-28T17:52:00.000-08:00

Coming soon...

- threaded
- editing
- digg comments
- bury comments (collapsable)
- friends comments turn green (posting or digging)

sneak peek (quicktime)

Kevin

Developers: Upcoming RSS Change

2006-02-21T13:12:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to give a heads up to all 3rd party digg developers (widgets, apps, etc.). Later this week we will be adding several new elements to our RSS feeds. You will now have the ability to pull submitter name, number of comments, number of diggs, friends that have dugg a story, and user icons URLs (<digg:submitter>, <digg:username>, <digg:commentcount>, <digg:diggcount>, <digg:friend>, <digg:userimage>). We have tested this and it will have no effect on users and most addons.

API is coming, but not until we launch digg v3.0.

Kevin