hello there! if you're new here and like what you read, you may want to grab the rss feed so you can always be up to date. thanks for visiting!

more than a few people have pointed me towards a tool created by ajax economy that purports to record all bury data for any submission made to digg, asking for comments. i would love to see a tool like this that works and captures 100% of the data but here’s why you shouldn’t get too excited about this particular tool. on the announcement page for version 0.2 of the tool, the site states that the tool is capturing 100% of the data but if you read into how the tool works you’ll see that a more accurate statement is that ‘it captures 100% of all available data’, which is not much by any means.

this application gets the json feed used by digg spy. it does this using ajax (i.e. the xmlhttprequest object) which requires a server side proxy due to domain security restrictions. due to the way that the json is returned from digg spy, it doesn’t set a variable equal to the returned object, which force us to use the before mentioned server side proxy and an eval statement instead of using dom manipulation. the application simply polls for updated data every 20 seconds which makes sure we don’t miss any data and that it doesn’t put too much strain on the server.

the simple problem here is that the tool relies on the json feed from digg spy and yes, it does capture 100% of the data shown by that feed. the feed from digg spy, however, only shows approximately less than 10% of the activity on digg (just do some basic math in your head and you’ll see that there is no way that it could show more data than that and be even remotely readable). so what you essentially have is 100% of 10% of all data, which for all purposes is highly inaccurate because even the 10% is not spread over all stories.

that said, if someone has come up with a better, more accurate way to record information, or thinks the above mentioned is incorrect, please have your say in the comments. for what i know digg shows partial data and there is no way to get the data for the all the activity on the site.

Technorati Tags: digg, digg spy, ajax economy, bury, tool, data

there are several objective ways to determine someone’s rank or to fit someone into an artificial hierarchy on a socially driven site, and i will cover some of the existing ones and offer some thoughts of my own. what you will note is that no single objective measure is enough and we need some way to calculate participation across all these metrics.

1. promoted stories: this is the absolute number of stories out of all your submissions, that have been promoted to a site’s homepage. the problem here is that people can submit as many stories as they find, in the hopes that some of them will make it to the homepage, and not enforce any quality control (i.e. they will hedge their bets by banking on volume rather than quality).
2. promotion ratio: this is the percentage of your submissions that end up on the homepage. the problem here is that though a user may have a solid ratio, in most cases a high ratio is the result of very rigorous quality control, which usually means infrequent submissions. users with high ratios usually have low overall participation.
3. average votes received: the average votes a user receives per story is a good indicator of average content quality. someone can have a lot of stories promoted with all of them receiving 400 votes or he can have a few stories promoted with 3,000 votes each. just having a story promoted is not enough because often stories are promoted and then get buried or are promoted but don’t really catch on.
4. average comment ratings: how well are a community member’s comments generally received? slashdot has one of the most developed comment rating systems among the top news aggregators right now because it allows you to not only rate a comment but also categorize a comment (for example, as humorous, insightful, etc).

those are some of the mechanisms that exist (though only the first two are used by most people). here are a couple of other metrics that could potentially be used:

1. quality of votes given: does a user blindly vote everything or heavily reciprocate? or does the user only vote for the content he thinks is good and should be promoted? one of the ways we could judge the quality of votes given (from the general community’s perspective) is to see what percentage of stories a user votes on, ultimately end up on the homepage of the site.
2. diversity of participation: diversity of participation is akin to balanced participation. this category will distinguish those that are just submitting apple rumors and ron paul stories from those who contribute good content in a wide-ranging array of categories.

like i said, none of these measures are telling enough on their own but if we are able to use all of them together, we can come up with a better way of recognizing who the best participators in social news are, above and beyond pure popularity. are there any other metrics that you think we should be looking at as well?

Technorati Tags: social news, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, slashdot, top user

according to james surowiecki, author of the wisdom of crowds, what’s interesting about decision markets such as the iem (iowa electronic markets) and the hsx (hollywood stock exchange) is that they function fairly well without much (or any) money at stake. however, evidence suggests that such markets operate better (i.e. the people participating in these make better decisions) when there are financial rewards attached to decisions made in the markets. extending the same idea to social news, propeller has been paying scouts for over a year now and is very happy with the progress they have seen, and newsvine has a somewhat different revenue-share model with its community which seems to be working just as well. at the same time, other major contenders (digg, reddit, and stumbleupon) refuse to reward their users.

the decision of some sites compensate community members has had the obvious impact of increasing participation and hypothetically the quality of the participation on those sites, but has also had an unintended side-effect. for example, newsvine is a mix of news with blogged content and links, but since users make money from ads on their content, it is in every user’s best interest to produce the best possible content to make the most money possible. at the same time, because some people are making money in the social news sphere (i.e. the hired scouts at propeller and the popular content producers on newsvine), people on other sites have been exposed to the idea of making money from social news. in the absence of any official ways to make money on these other sites, people are look towards external sources for income.

why do we participate on other social news sites?

here are some of the reasons i could think of:

1. status and reputation: just because we want to climb to the top of the leaderboard and be recognized for our efforts.
2. monetary reward: because we can make money through it. in this case this money isn’t coming from the site, rather from someone on whose behalf you’re participating.
3. self-promotion: because we want to be in a position to push our own content and build traffic to our own site/product/service.
4. helping others: because we can help other people out. part of the reason why i continue to participate on digg is because i know how much value the site can create for a content producer and if i can help someone get closer to that goal, that’s enough for me.
5. idealism: because we believe in the principle of socially driven news and want to be a part of the movement.

what’s even more interesting about surowiecki’s analysis is his mention that for active participants in these markets, status and reputation is often incentive enough to get them to participate in something that is ultimately a game (much like social news). which means that just the existence of a leaderboard should be enough to keep people who are looking for rewards, interested in social news sites. the problem, however, is when one group is making money, the status and reputation doesn’t seem like a satisfactory enough reward, and what we notice is that the number of people is who are participating in social news either for fun or because they believe in the movement, starts to dwindle in favor of #2 and #3 from above.

of course there is genuine interest in the social news space, but this secondary reason (especially for long-time users with some clout) is becoming increasingly important. a substantial number of users are participating because they think at some point they will be able to get a return on their participation (their time investment in the sites), which can also be seen in the huge influx of content producers and marketers into the space, not because they want to genuinely participate, but because they are seeking the the future return.

what reward is rewarding enough?

if money corrupts social news participation (as many non-paying sites claim) and your name on a page is not rewarding enough any more, then how do social sites reward users that are bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for them?

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social news, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, newsvine, iem, hsx, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds