In lieu of getting into a debate about political analogies, I will make one clear statement: Digg has never been a true democracy and the new Digg does not change this.

What “The New Digg” does do is redistribute the power that is currently in the hands of hundreds of users and a couple dozen websites and divides that power to more websites and much, much fewer users.

“But wait! I thought the new Digg would make it to where everyone’s Digg is counted equally? I thought every user will have the power that was unlawfully taken from them by power users.”

On the contrary, the new Digg will make many current “power users” impotent while opening the doors for 2 new breeds of power users. I will detail them below by breaking them into the 3 branches of Digg government.

The Publishers Branch

Bigger is better in the new Digg. The old days of “build a website, put up viral content, find a Digg power user, and profit” are gone (for the most part). CNN, NYTimes, Mashable, HuffingtonPost — the giant news sources and blogs that currently do so well on Digg already will be exponentially empowered based upon sheer size and natural following.

The Old Power Users Branch

To the dismay of many, the old-school power users will retain much of the same power they had before, again based upon a carryover of following. Those who follow MrBabyMan today will still be following him when the new Digg rolls out. Rather than following his submissions, they will be presented with his Diggs. This is a key shift in that the power users will (should) no longer be digging 200 stories a day and submitting 1-3. Instead, they will (should) be Digging only the stories that they want their followers to see.

Their submissions will still be necessary for many sites, but it’s in how they curate their Diggs that the real juice pops in. Rather than have a ton of power over 1-3 stories, they will have a good amount of power over a couple dozen stories. They are the old-school tastemakers.

The New Digg Power Users Branch

When Twitter was an infant, the biggest users were names that most had never heard of before. It wasn’t until it attained mainstream attention that the celebrities and websites started taking over and shooting past the early adopters. The same will happen on Digg.

Tony Hawk. Leo Laporte. Pete Cashmore. These people will not only have power through their own content, but will now be able to guide content from others’ sites to be viewed by their followers. It’s a strange thing, but if Pete Cashmore Diggs a Techcrunch story, it will have exponentially more impact than it does today.

Who Gets Hurt?

1. Large websites who don’t do it right: if you are a large publisher and haven’t developed a Digg plan, you really should soon.
2. Small websites who don’t do it right: just because you’re not CNN doesn’t mean you’ll be left out in the cold.
3. Current Power Users who don’t get it: if you are still Digging 200+ stories a day when the new Digg rolls out, you won’t maintain much of a following for long.
4. Digg.com: in the long run, Digg is going to look back at this and think it was either the absolute best or absolute worst thing they’ve ever done. There is no in-between.

One thing and one thing only is certain about the new Digg: many will hate it and many will love it, but the company must go “all in” for them to make it through to 2011 and beyond. I’m very impressed with the guts they’ve demonstrated if nothing else. WTG Digg!

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Read more about the New Digg on this blog.

I learned how to drive 36 million pageviews to web properties through social media platforms by employing three levels of adoption. The Social Trinity is the foundation of a social media policy that allows you to use communication tools on digital networks for the purpose of building your own community. Once you gain an understanding of the true value of each contact feature on a digital network, you can adapt the use of social platforms, formulate your social media strategy, and communicate with your target communities and to make them part of your own community.

The Social Trinity

1. Identify all points of exposure for your digital assets.
2. Identify all points of private contact.
3. Study popular sections and past successful campaigns launched on the digital network.

For instance on Twitter, a point of exposure can be an @reply, hashtag, comment on a wall, link to external website over which you have control. Points have exposure leave your footprint on an action performed on a social network. When you @reply a person your conversation exchange is viewed by everybody who follows you and that person and people who find your conversation through a search engine query. Naturally, the more you @reply people the more you are exposed to their followings. Similarly, on Digg when you vote for content, you leave a link pointing back to your profile; thus the the more you Digg the more exposure you receive to your digital asset on Digg – your profile.

Points of private contact will allow you to work out collaborative arrangements with other users of the platform. Peripherally, you should also learn how the culture on the digital network shapes the way private means of contact are used. I know of many people with large followings that typically ignore direct messages; an alternative way of contact would be to follow the link in a Twitter user’s profile to load up a person’s blog or other website that may have an email or other point of contact to which a person may pay more attention. Some people more frequently use the Facebook private messaging system.

Some platforms have popular sections such as the Digg front page and Twitter trending topics. You could study these popular submissions and adapt your submissions to cater to the community members’ interests. When popular entries are hard to find, google terms such as ‘twitter case study’ or ‘[social network]‘ + ‘case study’ or ‘[popular tactic]‘ like ‘contests, sweepstakes, viral campaigns.’ Once you learn of popular and successful campaigns you can try a similar campaign adapted to cater to your target community; you use your points of exposure and points of private contact to communicate with other people on the platform required to execute your campaign.

Neal Rodriguez discusses social media marketing tactics he has executed to meet his and his clients’ business objectives on nealrodriguez.com. Subscribe to Neal’s feed to stay abreast of his updates.

On August 1st, 2009, I announced that I would no longer be using the Diggbar because they were redirecting traffic back to their site.

Kevin Rose said his first move as CEO of Digg was to kill that aspect of the Diggbar.

Today, Digg came to their senses. Finally.

From their blog:

Hi All, A few weeks ago we announced the sunsetting of the Digg iFrame Toolbar. As part of this, we are also making a change to a related feature – the ability to generate a Digg short URL from any URL on the web.

As of May 17th, 2010, the Digg short URL feature will be available only for URLs that refer to stories submitted to Digg. Users will continue to be able to share their favorite Digg stories by generating a short URL via the “Share” button. However, it will not be possible to generate a short URL for a web URL that does not refer to a submitted story on Digg. The “shorturl.create” method in Digg API will be deprecated as of that date. Previously generated Digg short URLs will continue to operate beyond this date.

For those looking for a general short URL service, we request you to choose from several alternatives – here is a list of Short URL service providers.

Thanks and regards,

Keval

Thank you, Kevin. Thank you.

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Read more about Digg on this blog.

Social news site Digg was just “having a little fun” when they decided to put Mario in many of their Diggbar links.

Nintendo disagreed and sent a cease and desist letter to Digg asking them to remove their trademarked character from use on their site.

The letter below, leaked to us by a trusted source, indicates that Nintendo is concerned about “the marketing or sale of your products & services.” Other than generating traffic for the purpose of increase advertising revenue and the sale of Digg “swag”, Digg does not actually sell a product.

This story is developing. We will update as more information is made available

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Read more on this social media blog.

Digg.com has been in the top 100 sites in the US for some time, but they have finally gone global.

According to Alexa, they are #99 worldwide in Traffic Rank. After a rough run through 2009 that ended strong, they have surpassed their strong 2008 levels.

While recent financial success, integration with Twitter and Facebook, and a renewed focus on social news has helped Digg increase in importance and visitors over the last year, a look at their importance in different countries points east.

In Pakistan, Digg ranks 18th in traffic rank, while in nearby India Digg ranks 32. Bangladesh is 3rd at 33rd compared to the United States, where it’s 40th.

The United Kingdom (63) is the only European nation where Digg ranks in the top 100, while South Africa (64) is the only African country there.

What does this say about Digg? While it has diversified from its tech-news roots over the past 3 years, there is still a strong tech contingent, especially with Internet-related topics. Humorous pictures and videos have  been the most popular “shared” items in social media and Digg is no exception, but the tremendous traffic-driving potential of a Digg front page compels people across the English-speaking world to use it.

As long as Digg stays true to its users, there should be no reason to expect the growth trends to end any time soon.

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Read more about Digg on this Social Media Blog.

In June of 2008, 31% of the Digg front page was controlled by 10 users and 51% was controlled by the top 30.

Things are a bit different as the Digg algorithm has moved in recent months to add more diversity to the mix, preventing many “power users” from having stories promoted several times a day while making it easier for non-power-users to hit the front page.

Below, you’ll see a breakdown with the top 10 users down from 31% to just over 10% and the top 50 having fewer front pages than the top 30 a year and a half ago.

While the system is far from perfect and the glaring hole on the left side of the chart (millions of users represented by less than half of the front page) it is still a step in the right direction. Concepts such as anonymous submissions, unauthenticated voting, and API-based digging, burying, and submitting have been tossed around lately.

Whatever they do next, one thing is certain. Their goal is to make money, as any business should, and in so being their path will be determined by what is best for the advertisers in their opinion. While it is still a community-driven site, they believe that their user-base is strong enough to handle changes that cater to profits. Whether or not this is true will be determined in the next few months.

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Read more about the Digg Front Page on Soshable.

Digg is known for definitively dropping the “ban hammer” on those who post content that includes nipples. Apparently, the rules have changed.

This screenshot from a video has been modified to a PG-13 level, but the original video does include visible nipples that are not-so-hidden. While I have nothing against the submitter (nor anything against the video) I feel the double standard here. The content was pretty darn funny, as the nearly-4000 Diggs clearly says, but it just doesn’t belong on Digg.

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Read more about Digg on the Social Media Blog.

Digg is having one of their quarterly Townhall Meetings tomorrow (Thursday, August 13th). The team at the Social Blade Show will be there and will focus their show on discussing what’s new, what was discussed, and how it will affect the Digg community.

Here are the current top-dugg questions:

1. Will users ever be able to comment on the new types of ads? This could be an effective way of getting feedback on an ad directly from the users themselves.
2. even if they must stay – no sound ads, please
3. Any plans for an official Digg iPhone App? I’d buy that for a dollar.
   If not, do I need to build one myself with your fancy, recently updated API?
4. Kevin, last townhall you said the Upcoming section “might potentially be going away” and that a new digg which delivers a more customized experience is on its way. Unfortunately, Jay had to stop you before you revealed too much. Any updates on the big changes? Would you tell us something Jay doesn’t want you to?
5. Some sites cannot appear on the recommendation engine regardless of who submits or diggs them. Why is this? I’d be happy to demonstrate, so please don’t say “The recommendation engine presents different sites to different people.”
   There are sites that absolutely do not appear to anyone on the recommendation engine. I have analyzed analytics for dozens of sites – some that get 10 diggs will get at least a few referrals from the recommended pages, while other sites with the same analytics can get over 100 diggs, yet mysteriously zero referrals from the recommendation pages. Many of the sites we’ve tested were once regularly on the Digg front page getting thousands of Diggs. Now, they haven’t been able to hit for months, even years. If they’re blacklisted, why not just ban them and get it over with?
6. The new digg ads are a welcome change. I even turned off Adblock Plus for them. However, doing that just reminded me how terrible the regular ads are. I know it’s a long shot to ask for them to be eliminated, but could you at least put some kind of limit on how annoying the ads you run are?
7. In an earlier townhall, you guys seemed to have misunderstood the “You have already dugg this story” dialog box question. Most of us understand it is technically infeasible for the digg count and dugg status to update automatically in realtime, but why not allow the stats to update *instead* of popping a dialog box?
   I understand that the dialog pops to inform the user that the story in question has already been dugg, but the stats don’t automatically update after the dialog is cleared. The page has to be manually reloaded for the stats to update.
   With multiple stories open in a few tabs, and the comments open in others, I run into this dialog far too often. After using the diggbar in one tab, and making sure I dugg it after commenting, “You have already dugg this story” gets on my nerves. Just update the stats! Or reload the page! Don’t pop an unnecessary dialog without updating the stats. Kthx.
   @SFBrian knows what I’m talking about. We discussed it at the Seattle Neumos meetup.
8. Fix the bouncing comment box, please.
9. Here’s my question:

   I can understand eliminating shouts. After all, they were getting pretty spammy.

   However, having no way to contact your friends while onsite is even more frustrating.

   Could you at least please provide one-on-one personal messaging? The code for that probably already exists in the shouts feature, and shouldn’t require a lot of tweaking to implement.

   Thanks, and I hope you give this serious consideration.

10. Like many mobile phone users, I love to use m.digg.com when I’m out and about, or just wasting time at work.
    Can you add the functionality of being able to bury stories, or to digg and bury comments?

Join the Social Blade show at 7:00 pm PST, 10:00 pm EDT, live.

… and you shouldn’t either.

With that out of the way, let’s get right down to it:

1. They Pulled a “Bait and Switch”

Regardless of what anyone at Digg says, this was just wrong. They should have either kept the Diggbar as a URL shortener or launched it initially with its current functionality.

Wikipedia defines a Bait and Switch as:

In retail sales, a bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in customers by advertising a product or service at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute is available.

Below is my version of the definition as it fits with what Digg has done:

In social media, a bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the website putting forth the fraud lures in users by promoting their service as a portal to great content, then reveals to the user that the functionality has been changed but that substitute content is available.

We were pulled in because it was easy to use, helped to promote strong content, and displayed the source to everyone who clicked on it, Digg user or not. It now takes the vast majority of most people’s Twitter followers to the page on Digg relating to the content. Baited. Switched.

2. Social Media is About Sharing Content

Most visitors to Digg come there to find the hot stories, images, and videos of the day. Some use Twitter for the same reason.  When we post links on Twitter, most people do so hoping to share something that they found interesting, funny, or compelling with their friends.

There is nothing interesting, funny, or compelling about Digg.com. The content that Digg.com LINKS TO can be interesting, funny, and compelling, but nothing on the site itself is worth tweeting.

3. The Rationale Behind the Change was Incorrect

It was noted that Techcrunch uses a URL shortener on their site to direct traffic in a compact manner back to Techcrunch. This makes sense because it’s a blog. It produces it’s own content (see reason #2).

Digg does not produce content within the site itself other than the blog and the occasional video interview.  The comparison is invalid. The intent might be the same, but the rationale behind mimicking Techcrunch is flawed(.

4. Digg Users Don’t Like It

All too often, Digg does things from their perspective only. They have in the past accommodated their users wishes, but some of the decisions they make are almost too self-centered. It’s a user generated site. We create the buzz. We supply the stories. We write about the site on our blogs. We tell our friends. Without the users, Digg would not be able to function. I would love to point to the discussion that Digg had with its users and the feedback that they received as a result, but there was no discussion, no chance for feedback. Heck, there wasn’t even an announcement of the change until after the change was made.

The reason there was no discussion is because they were well aware that the feedback would be negative and that the community wouldn’t like it and they did it anyway.

5. Twitter Users Don’t Like It

It’s an extra click for most Twitter users to get to the content that they were intended to see. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, right? If you can show me any other service or website that requires a second click to display the content, I’ll do a video of me dancing in my underwear and post it on YouTube.

6. There are Better Alternatives

Why did people use the Digg URL shortener? Because it displayed the content, had a Digg button in the frame, it tracked clicks, and for some because it’s simple to create (just put “digg.com” in front of any URL and Voila!). Here are alternatives and brief descriptions:

• Bit.ly – Great tracking, simple toolbar interface, and redirects to the source.
• Su.pr – A work in progress, but it connects to Twitter and Facebook, has decent tracking, and helps to promote good content.
• Sharetool – (Almost) everything that Diggbar was and adds other social bookmarking tools to the toolbar.

7. Sheer Principle

The entire situation was, in my opinion, handled wrong. As I stated, if this was the plan, they should have rolled it out like that. If it wasn’t the plan, they should have made the change more transparently.  I cannot in good conscience Tweet a diggbar link ever again (other than this one and only because doing so appeals to the wonderful nature of irony).

BUT WAIT, THERE’S A SOLUTION

It isn’t too late to fix this and make everyone happy.  Digg can keep the functionality of the current “Share” features they have attached to submissions. The majority of users who tweet or add links to Facebook from Digg do so through the button on the submission itself. When they do, the standard shortened URL is followed by a Twitter “?t” and a Facebook “?f”.

Tweets and Facebook posts from the Digg.com story page can maintain their current functionality of sending logged in users to the source and unauthenticated or non-users to the Digg page. The majority of shares will still accomplish Digg’s goals.

For those of use who prefer the “old way”, any Diggbar shortened URLs that are raw (in other words, the ones that don’t have ?t and ?f at the end of the the URL) will use the old functionality. The only way to generate this URL would be through putting “digg.com” in front of a URL, a browser add-on (that I’m sure someone would be happy to develop at no cost to Digg), or simply by erasing the ?t or ?f.

If Digg checks the sources closely, they’ll see that the majority of their traffic that comes from Diggbar has the added characters at the end because most users are sharing it that way. The “loss” from those who chose to use the old-style version of the Diggbar would not be a loss at all. If anything, Digg would gain from the small percentage of users who then use the Diggbar because more people would be exposed to the domain.

It’s just a thought.

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Read more on this social media blog.

We’re approaching 2 weeks on since the unveiling of Digg’s new duplicate submissions detector. We’re strongly, strongly hoping that it improves. In many ways, the old, worn out version was more accurate.

Day one displayed a much-publicized “DOH!” when 2 stories ABOUT the dupe detector (the one linked above and this article from Brent Csutoras) hit the front page at the same time. You couldn’t plan it any better than this:

That was day one. Getting the bugs out. Addressing the issues. No big deal.

Then, it happened again. This time, it was 3 stories, but they were spaced out over a 5 day period saying pretty much the same thing.

Notice that all three mention “Jammie Thomas”. It’s cut off on the bottom submission, but it also include the word “$1.92″ that is mentioned in the top two submissions.  Reading all three articles, it is very clear that a proper dupe detector would have picked them up very easily after the first was submitted.

It did not.

You may say, “They were probably offered by ignored by the submitters.” Nope – I was the second submitter and MrBabyMan, the third submitter, assured me that he did not see them as dupes. Why would we submit them, especially after they had already hit the front page by the time we did?

Again, we are hopeful. Digg has been very good at fulfilling its promises and improving on its technology for several months now. The site is too strong and too enjoyable to have silly programming errors hamper the overall experience.

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Read more about Digg on this Social Media Blog.