Secret behind DIGG’s Yellow Brick Road

As many people have tried to figure out, the secret behind Digg’s Algorithm remains to this day a conundrum, a mystery, a secret clouded in obfuscation. Some great thinkers have of recent date conjured up the belief that it might not be a secret at all, and that for all the investigation, maybe a magic formula doesn’t really exist, at all. Perhaps it’s a great hoax, like the Wizard of Oz, a case of smoke and mirrors a pretense held up to keep to the world in the dark, when in actuality it’s just someone assigned to the role of wizard who makes decisions frivolously and on a whim with each and every new entry that is fed into the Digg news bank.

For those of you who are not aware, Digg is a social bookmarking website that offers participants (aka diggers) a way to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories where other diggers can vote the content up or down in a process respectively called digging and burying. Tens of thousands of stories are submitted daily, but only the most Dugg stories ever appear on the front page. So the obvious goal for diggers is to continuously make attempts at grasping at the illusive gold ring, every time they hop on the Digg-go-round. With its immense popularity, it has prompted the creation of other social networking sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Techorati and others to evolve based on a similar premise.
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Other lines of algorithm speculation include those proposed by Rand Fishkin, euphemistically referred to as the Wizard of Moz, but who is in actuality the CEO and Founder of SEOmoz, a hub for search marketers worldwide that provides education, tools and resources to help search engine optimization companies improve their skills.

Fishkin believes that even though Digg isn’t as widely used as Google (whose complex algorithm is another story altogether), it has become highly sophisticated in mixing and blending a unique mixture of ingredients into their algorithmic stew!

He, like others, assesses the obvious; i.e. voting in and of itself is the dominant component. The theory being: if one votes for one article more than others, the more popular story should succeed in the final analysis, similar to our recent presidential election (unless of course the Electoral College thinks differently, but that’s another Wizard of Oz story).

Differing from a mere popularity contest, Digg has taken into consideration a factor that is missing in general elections, and that is timing. Any number of votes in a very short period (if not manipulative) is stronger than the same number of votes over a longer time span. The speed of voting is given more weight, based on the idea that a buzz has been created and excited the digerati to gravitate toward the story quickly.

Also if a low number of stories have recently made the front page in a given category (as all submissions have to note content type), the story is likely to get on top with fewer votes; whereas if there is a high number of recent submissions, the opposite may be true. Also the time of day is a trigger. If 100s of people all tag the same item at 12 midnight, this might be a disqualifying factor and Digg red flag the submission.

The idea of manipulation is another dynamic that Digg is known to weigh. They look at the domain from whence the link came. Has it had content submitted previously? Did that content receive votes, get marked as spam or make the front page? And has the domain been automatically flagged for being manipulative?

Then you have the consideration as to the profile of the submitters and voters. Have they submitted or voted on high quality stories in the past? Or are they simply voting for their own work? Also how many friends do they have? Diggers with more friends can obviously sway a vote. And how long have they been diggers. New registrants might be spammers.

Similar to the Wizard of Oz parody video shown above, the truth of the matter is there is some manual intervention. Many Digg users may not realize it, but all the stories to hit the front page are virtually scrutinized by the Digg editorial staff that may or may not pull a story if they determine the content is too marketing-focused, driven by marketing dollars or has a marketing agenda.

The source of the votes is also thought to be a significant algorithmic element. If the same IP address or IP block appears for one submission, or if an abnormally high number of folks came via a certain geographic region to a Digg page (for example, with no referring URL) these methods could possibly signifying a mass email or IM link. In these instances, Digg might be discounting the value of those votes.

Less of a factor is the “number of views” to the actual Digg ratio. Nonetheless, an abnormally high ratio of views with few diggs could mean that people aren’t really fans of the content that they have given it some consideration, but don’t believe in it enough to spend the time and effort to vote for it.

Matt Asay, GM for Alfresco, a leading open source enterprise content management firm notes that in his interviews with Rami Taibah, a veritable Digg rock star, with over a 100-front page stories on Digg have offered up a few nuggets of wisdom for diggers. Rabitha believes that Digg wants a diversity of people to digg up a post, and that if you continually rely on your same crew of diggers, your future diggs will start to slide in the ratings. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt, according to Asay that Taibah “has over 2,500-plus followers (to rely on), which means that he has a ready-made audience of fans that tend to like the things he Diggs, but who’s counting?”

Finally, why not explore what Digg has to say about its own secret formula. Getting it from the horse’s mouth, Anton Kast, with the inscrutable title of Lead Scientist (shades of the Wizard again) is quick to admit that tweaking the Digg algorithm is a continuous work in progress. But he also states that Digg has “made a few notable enhancements to (their) promotional algorithm recently, to ensure that all Diggers have a fair chance at getting their submitted stories promoted to the homepage,”

And with that definitive and enigmatic statement posted to Digg’s blog, February 12, 2009, Kast quietly slips back behind the veiled secret curtain where only the Oz of Digg can hide well, maybe with some assistance of one MC Hammer! Because Digg is an enigma, and like all enigmas, as Hammer prophetically chants: “U can’t touch this!”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Da7DVb6-MM[/youtube]

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Junoba: The Google of Digg, Reddit, and Many More Social Bookmarking Sites

Junoba, the social bookmarking search engine, makes finding popular links on your favourite bookmarking sites even easier.

On the face of it, Junoba looks just like any other search engine: it has a simple, clutter-free design with a logo, a few words about its purpose, and a search field.  It is a no-frills search engine, and in this respect is much like Google or any other search service.

But what differentiates Junoba from many other search engines available on the web is that it is refined specifically for the purpose of searching through social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Reddit, Fark, Stumbleupon, and others, for popular links uploaded by users.

Junoba works the same as any other popular search engine: just type in a few words about what you want to find, and away you go. The difference is that instead of giving you everything on the Internet, it brings you a specialized list of links form the most popular social bookmarking sites. You can even specify your searches to pin down results from particular bookmarking sites.

For example: (Warning: SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!) If one was to search for, oh, I don’t know, “new year linux” one might find my article on Digg as the first result. (Hooray, I’ve garnered an incredibly small amount of attention in the vast and expansive wasteland that is the Internet! Oh God I’m so lonely…)

I find that as the popularity of social bookmarking spreads it gets more and more difficult to manage the plethora of bookmarking sites I regularly visit. Visiting fifteen different sites just to see what people are linking to can get tiresome, and trying to remember which one of the vast array of bookmarking sites had that one link with the picture of the guy getting hit in the junk with a wiffle ball can sometimes be frustrating.

Junoba looks to make that process easier, by bringing all those competing social bookmarking sites together for you to search through quickly and easily.

Of course, the easiest way to see how it works is to check it out for yourself!

Are you a Digg Snob?

I’ve been a member of the popular social bookmarking site ‘Digg‘ since late 2006, and I’d like to take a moment to discuss an emerging and unsettling trend I’ve noticed: Digg Elitism and the rise of the Digg Snob.

I define a Digg Snob as a person who, while very active on the site, does not reciprocate friendship requests from other active members. I can understand ignoring requests from users with sketchy usernames like ‘diggnasty’ or ‘paid-to-digg,’ or those that have submitted 4,183 articles while only voting for 3 others, but it seems like there are those that ignore requests just because they can.

So what can you do to fight the Digg Snobs? I recently went through my friend list and removed all those that did not reciprocate. If enough ‘fans’ pull out, maybe the elite won’t ride quite as high.

And for those snobby diggers, I offer this suggestion: take the shovel out (see image) and consider returning the favor to some of your deserving fans.

Zigtag Brings Intelligent Social Bookmarking to the Web

This week a new social bookmarking site by the name of Zigtag went live, and is vying for some of the market held by bookmarking  sites like Delicious.

Zigtag is yet another service that allows users to bookmark sites and share them with friends or the entire web by tagging certain ones as favourites. Like Delicious, Zigtag looks to give your favourite websites more exposure by establishing a network to share them with others, while giving users an easy way to find interesting content on the web.

But what sets Zigtag apart from its competition is its unique approach to the tagging process. As most people familiar with social bookmarking know, tagging is the act of giving posts or bookmarks labels so that similar bookmarks can be grouped together and indexed.  But the tagging mechanic is not perfect; tags are often ambiguous and inflexible, resulting in a lot of junk-tags and unnecessary tagging.

Zigtag aims to change this with its intelligent tagging process. Zigtag users tag bookmarks in the usual way, assigning tags to them so that they can categorized, organized, managed, shared and retrieved. But unlike sites like Delicious, which uses static tags, Zigtag’s tagging system gives each tag a definition. This means that when you tag a site with “XP” for example, that Zigtag knows the post is about the operating system Windows XP, instead of just filing the bookmark into the “XP” category.

This intelligent definition-based tagging system means that users don’t have to worry about flooding their bookmark with every imaginable tag in order to cover just one subject; when the user uses the tag “XP” they simply choose the definition that best describes what their post is about.

For example, they might choose the definition that says that XP refers to the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. This alleviates the need to use all the other tags associated with XP, such as “Windows”, “Windows XP”, “Microsoft XP”, “MS XP”, and so on, making the tagging process much less frustrating.

Intelligent bookmarking also solves the problem of ambiguous tags. For example, the tag “New York” might refer to the city or the state. On traditional tagging systems posts about NY state and NY city would be lumped together. But with intelligent tags the user simply selects the proper definition, ensuring that the bookmark is categorized properly.

Besides the interesting intelligent tagging system, Zigtag also offer many of the other social networking features familiar to other bookmarking sites: users can add friends and share their favourites bookmarks with them, look at their friends’ favourite bookmarks, or simply browse through the entire Zigtag community for interesting sites.

Users can also import their friends from Hotmail or Gmail accounts, and import bookmarks from their Delicious account.

I’m a bit new to the whole social bookmarking thing myself, so I don’t have any serious qualms with any of the top services out their; there really doesn’t seem to be any reason not to just use all of them. But the one thing that has always bugged me is the tagging system.

To put it simply it always just seemed dumb to have to flood a tag list with every imaginable pseuodonym and name-variation in order to categorize it properly, only to have most of the tags go unused, or have good bookmarks go ignored because one crucial tag was missed. Zigtag seems to have come up with a solution to this problem, and hopefully it catches on outside of Zigtag’s service, making tagging easier for all of us.

Zigtag is free to sign up for and download, and you can check it out here.

Now it’s time for me to add every tag I can think of to this post.

Social Bookmarking: What Can it Do For Me?

For those who don’t know what social bookmarking is, most will define it as putting the Bookmarks Folder from your Web browser on a specific site for all users to see. It has now become a phenomenon as others who look on social bookmarking sites will bookmark others’ content, to turn something popular into something even more popular.

There are several Social Bookmarking sites on the web today, and the top five are:

• Digg
• Del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit
• Squidoo

These sites are set up so a user can create a profile, just as they would on a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. This creates a community where people will see what other users are bookmarking. As a result of all this chatter amidst users, certain sites can often get more traffic than they normally would have received by just sitting around on the web.

Some writers are using social bookmarking as a tool for viral or guerilla marketing for their content. There are some strategies necessary for this, and they are as simple as a pointing and clicking on a recommendations area to post their article on a social bookmarking site.

Some have recommended that writers who post articles on the web not put every article that he or she will write on a social bookmarking site. Instead, just put the ones that will be helpful or of interest to other web surfers.

The best part of Social Bookmarking is that the user creates an external link to his or her site that will be useful for keyword searches on search engines. Of course, this shouldn’t be the only method an online writer should use for drawing traffic to their content, but it is an effective one. Those who want to become more effective in marketing should study the world of social bookmarking to discover how it works, and how to gain readers from it.

Source 1, Source 2, and Source 3