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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

in his book the wisdom of crowds, james surowiecki discusses some examples that show the power of google and how well its index performs. to explain how google works, he uses sergey brin and larry page’s paper called the anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine, and google’s definition of pagerank, their method of ranking results to your search queries in order of relevance:

pagerank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using its vast link structure as an organizational tool. in essence, google interprets a link from page a to page b as a vote, by page a, for page b. google assesses a page’s importance by the votes it receives. but google looks at more than sheer volume of votes, or links; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

the way google goes about it is that it’s not just the incoming links to a page (the absolute number of votes) that matter, but they also take into account the quality of those links (i.e. how many links the linking site itself has gotten and their quality, and so it goes on).

this got me thinking, why does social media have to be democratic (i.e. one person one vote, where all votes are created equal)? if we assume that the average user on a social media site is ‘fairly intelligent’ (though it’s true that not all users are equally savvy and in the end some users will rise above others to be stronger contributers) then it makes sense to give a ‘top contributor’ more weight than a new user just like google gives a link from techcrunch more importance than a link from my site. why? well, a top user, by definition, has become a top user because of all the votes he or she has garnered from other new and top users over time and therefore has proved that he represents a degree of quality (whether it be from natural skill/knack for cool-hunting or just a result of participating on a site for a longer time) that a new user has not attained yet (though may over time).

i know partly from experience and partly from what i’ve read about these sites that reddit and propeller are completely democratic (i.e. each user’s vote is equal and a higher karma or rank doesn’t mean you have more influence in the system), whereas stumbleupon by its construction gives more power to users based on their participation and the size of their audience (previously audience number, now just a combination of friends and fans), and digg leaves it somewhat ambiguous.

so what do you think do we need a new form of government?

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

Technorati Tags: digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, social news, republic, democracy, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

i’ve written a guest post at read/writeweb on alternate reality games (args) and how to properly use them as a viral marketing tool.

even though i enjoyed participating in them, until recently i hadn’t really thought about what makes them compelling - beyond their premise (i.e. the product they are based around).

read the entire article for 4 things to do and 6 things to avoid when making alternate reality games.

Technorati Tags: alternate reality game, arg, viral marketing, readwriteweb

i wrote a guest post at read/writeweb a couple days ago on how a couple of nerds with the help of some friends, were able to take over youtube.

to help shed some light on the project and how the nerdfighters took over the 4th most popular destination on the web and the number one site for video hosting and sharing, I had a chat with hank, one of the orchestrators of the coup.

check out the complete interview.

Technorati Tags: nerds, nerdfighters, youtube, brotherhood 2.0, ecogeek, readwriteweb

i wrote a guest post at read/writeweb yesterday, taking a look at the new features we may soon see on digg.

with all the things that we can expect in the next few months, I can really say I haven’t been this excited to see the next phase of digg in a long-time. especially considering that they are reaching out to the community at large to get feedback (usually they get feedback from limited focus groups).

have a look at all the features in detail.

Technorati Tags: digg, features, readwriteweb

i’ve written a guest post at last100 on a way to get around hulu’s closed private beta.

so there you have it. if you’ve been unsuccessfully hunting for a hulu invite for a while, look no further than to openhulu.

please check out the interview with the creator of openhulu.

Technorati Tags: hulu, openhulu, last100

i have to admit, in the past 2 years i’ve tried almost every greasemonkey script, firefox extention, and api-based digg tool, and there are only three tools that i continue to use regularly, one of which is digg alerter. digg alerter has been at version 1.2 for a while now (and with good reason, the release is really great) but now adam is opening up the forum to the users to request new features they would like to see implemented in the next release of the software.

here are some of the things that i would like to see implemented:

1. enable comment threading and the ability to see the comments’ current ratings (sort by most dugg comments).
2. have the option to list more than 100 people that dugg a particular post. this is especially useful for top diggers whose stories often require 150+ diggs before they are promoted.
3. the ability to double-click a link from digg alerter and go to that story’s digg page. and the ability to double-click a comment to go and respond to that comment.
4. front the personal file: the ability to record when a story hits front page. sometimes my submissions are promoted overnight and i would like to know how many diggs it took.

if you have ideas on how to improve digg alerter please leave adam a comment or send him an email.

p.s. the other two tools that i still use are the digg this! firefox extension and the add mirrors greasemonkey script.

Technorati Tags: digg, digg alerter

update: that was short-lived.

andy, reg, and i had requested that a fan make a wikipedia page for our weekly tech podcast, the drill down, and a fan and a good friend has done so. be the first to check out the just-created wikipedia page for the drill down, special thanks to mike.

mike is also known as mikeontv (on digg) and as promised, will be featured in an upcoming episode of the drill down for his help.

Technorati Tags: the drill down, podcast, tech, wikipedia, digg