Written on April 7, 2008 – 7:26 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
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Digg.com, down for maintenance, or new features?
Last week at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam Kevin Rose said: “We have to fix the Upcoming section because it’s broken. Nobody can follow the 50,000 new stories users submit per day”.
The future might not have been very far ahead of us. Digg.com just went down with the following message: “Digg will be down for a brief period, while we make some changes.”.
A few other quotes about the new features Kevin talked about:
Kevin: “When you digg a story that already has 3,000 diggs, you have no idea who those other 2999 people are. What else are they digging?”
As soon as Digg gets online again we will report it here and let you know if there are new features you can test.
UPDATE: Digg seems to come to live again. You can see the homepage between reloads.
Update II: yes, the account page seems to have been revamped. Not sure if this also includes the options described by Kevin Rose but will test some more. Here is a screenshot of the new page (click for fullscreen) and here is a link to a screenshot of the old one:
UPDATE III: Hmm, the old unknown fatal exception bug you sometimes get while Digging something is still here!
UPDATE IV: Aha, and the comment “There was a problem completing your request. Please reload the page and try again” bug is still alive too!
Written on April 3, 2008 – 12:47 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Kevin Rose is officiously one of the most famous Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. He has co-founded Revision3, Pownce, and of course his most popular company Digg. Somebody with such an entrepreneurial spirit certainly has something to tell, so we asked Scott Rafer - who also managed successful start-ups such as MyBlogLog - to interview Kevin on stage.
So the first question that comes to everybody’s mind is: how can you handle three start-ups at the same time? Rose: “It’s a matter of getting the right management in place”. For example, Kevin appointed Leah Culver as the lead developer of Pownce. She runs the show from day to day, while Kevin makes the strategic decisions.
Digg however, takes a lot of time. Kevin: “Digg is like my full-time job, the one I work on for 60 hours a week”. Moreover, the Digg-founder told that the company is large enough now - 55 employees - for things to happen on their own. He used to panic when the servers crashed, now he has a team to take care of a crisis like that.
Scott also asked Kevin some questions about the future of Digg. Kevin: “We have to fix the Upcoming section because it’s broken. Nobody can follow the 50,000 new stories users submit per day”. So how will Rose and his team do this? Well, they’re gonna follow the 3.0 trend by letting in the experts.
Kevin: “When you digg a story that already has 3,000 diggs, you have no idea who those other 2999 people are. What else are they digging?” So Digg will make connections and introduce you to other stories that might interest you. Some of them might not even be popular yet. They’ll make those connections by, amongst other things, following the so-called pressure users: the users that have an eye for good content. Based on their digg-behavior, the team can make better recommendations.
So ‘Digg suggests’ is an upcoming feature. If you can’t wait for that service to arrive, you might want to try the DiggSuggest web-app.
Written on February 15, 2008 – 12:01 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Just found this nice collection of Web2.0 offices. There are a few nice stories in between the photos so be sure to read those too.
As you may have noticed we often use these sort of photos as illustrations for our articles here at the Next Web Blog. We find them more interesting than a logo or screenshot. We all like to take a peek into the offices and are pleased to find out that there are real people (with messy desks) behind those shiny, polished and perfect websites. A few examples:
Twitter:
Netvibes:
Facebook:
Digg:
Want to peek into other offices too? Simply search for “Google office” at Flickr and you will surely find some snapshots. A few examples: Microsoft , Apple, Ask.com, Del.icio.us, TheNextWeb office or simply go to officesnapshots.com for more.
Written on January 29, 2008 – 3:15 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Digg.com doesn’t talk much about the number of registered Digg users. The last time they announced something was in March 2007 when they reached 1 million registered users. But it turns out that if you take a good luck at the source code of the profile pages, and John Graham-Cumming did just that, you can find a unique identifier, in a hidden HTML form input field, for every users that seems to auto increment with every new users.
Graham-Cumming looked at a lot of profile pages and plotted every month from December 2004 until December 2007 on a map. His conclusion: Digg currently has 2.7 millions users and if his data is correct then Digg is currently growing at a rate of around 110,000 users per month.
Digg, and in particular TriClear do have a fairly rudimentary view of what their users look like. Judging from the ads being pushed at us repeatedly we are a bunch of greasy pimplefaces who could benefit from using ‘TriClear Triple-Action Acne Eliminitator With Patented Cleaplexion Delivery Technology’.
Oh my God! It is like looking into a mirror!! How did they know?!?!
Is this YOU too? Then Digg me!
Written on January 24, 2008 – 5:23 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Digg team in their new office
Last night Kevin Rose posted an announcement on the official Digg Blog that the Digg algorithm, responsible for determining if your Digg will reach the front page, has been updated. They continuously work on the algorithm to make sure it is less sensitive to fraud attempts. This means that if the same group of people repeatedly Diggs the same group of URLs these Diggs are considered less valuable then Diggs from random groups of people.
Some people think these changes mean that new Digg members without any friends will have a higher change of getting to the front page of Digg than older members with more friends. This could lead to more fraud attempts using new and fake accounts.
Although that may well happen there is something else to consider. There is both a short and long term benefit to being Dugg. The short term benefit is only achieved if your Digged page becomes popular and makes it to the front page. Then you get an avalanche of random traffic from Digg. This is known as the Digg effect and can crash servers. The benefit of having a couple of thousand random visitors to your server has been disputed many times before. These visitors tend to visit your webpage for about a second or less and never come back. They just want to see what the fuss is all about.
“61% of your visits go to posts older than a month”
The long term benefit is bigger and undervalued. More and more people start to use alternatives to Google to find stuff on the Web. Michael Arrington has regularly stated that he uses Del.icio.us more than Google to find interesting content. The same goes for Digg. If you look at our visitor stats you see a fair amount of traffic coming from the Digg search engine. These aren’t visitors who notice our posts in the upcoming section of technology but people who search for a certain subject they have genuine interest in, get a bunch of previously Digged pages and pick our URL because it has received maybe 10 Diggs compared to the other URLs that received only one Digg. They come over, read our articles and stick around. That is the kind of traffic we want.
In general, it is better to concentrate on more insightful and thorough articles instead of quick news items. You would think that people try to stay up-to-date on your blog and that old news is forgotten and people only read the newer posts but this is not true. Deborah Schultz recently gave me these numbers based on research she did for 6 apart:
61% of your visits go to posts older than a month
37% of your visits go to posts from this month
12% of your visits go to current news
So if your goal is to get quality visitors you should try to write interesting and timeless articles and not just focus on breaking news. And make sure that people can find your older articles by being well represented in archives at Del.icio.us, Digg en similar sites. The new algorithm makes it harder to get your Digged page to the front page, but so what? The long term benefits far outweigh the short term benefits. My advice; keep digging and don’t worry too much about the front page.
After all, there is a good chance (61%) that by the time you read this it will be old news…
Written on December 11, 2007 – 12:29 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In an on-the-couch-interview with author Sarah Lacy, Rose gave some advices for entrepreneurs. A small selection, collected by your Le Web 3 correspondent:
- Don’t start raising funds too early. Make your concept perfect, then approach those angel funds and VC’s.
- Pick partners that understand the business.
- You don’t have to be a coder to start a project which you’re passionate about.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
