ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Digg.com has jumped the shark, it was fun while it lasted, and sure you can still get a lot of traffic from it, but it seems like a social software play that fails to leverage it’s crowd to do anything other than point at things like the village idiot. It did not require a lot of research to come to this conclusion, and anyone that wants to know about my methodology can ask me in the comments, or email me.

I rest my case, this was submited to digg two days ago and got one digg, when it’s probably one of the best bits of content that’s been published to the web in a while and certainly more important than the “dross of the moment” hat tip

So here’s the screenshot from the top stories on the “World & Business” section of digg:

My two main beefs with digg is:

1. Sensationalist news is not always the most relevant or important, I have local network news for sensationalist claptrap, and yet that is consistently what is promoted to the front page. It’s more a “viral news” tracker that actual news
2. Digg’s categorization of news items, or Information Architecture if you like, has always seemed woefully inadequate for the amount of information that was “passing through”

IMHO digg needs to get smarter in how it co-creates value with the community, and start really leveraging the crowds editorial and organizational skills, as opposed to the crowds ability to point. The fact that after it’s amazing growth initially it decided to go with an incredibly limited categorization hierarchy seems incredibly short sighted, and not very scalable. What about “tags” guys, what about a folksonomy, what about “tag clusters”, what about a co-created information architecture (see Peter Merholtz and Atomiqs articles on this). I’m sure that the limitation around categories and topics was one of the main drivers behind the digg clone phenomenon (over 250 digg like applications not counting social bookmarks), seriously, if digg handled categorization better there would not be the demand for digg clones. Even Steve at Micropersuasion pointed to another one today related to advertising called adveracio.us.

I guess what i’m arguing for is a rich multi-dimentional digg as opposed to the single dimension of popularity digg (I guess you could argue it’s two dimensions of popularity & category). Take for example this story about transparency in journalism from the Columbia Journalism Review, it was categorized under “politics”, and contains information about journalism, blogging, the media, jeff jarvis etc.

I don’t know, maybe it’s self-referential sensationalism can continue to generate a huge viewership, but surely the digg clones are a reaction to digg’s limited information space and bizarre categorization, but to me digg seems like one long episode of “cops” interspersed with brilliant excerpts from Robot Chicken.

from blaugh cartoons

BTW i’m not the first to accuse the digg system of mostly highlighting sensationalist claptrap, Richard MacManus wrote about it over at read/write web in February ‘06 On Sensationalism and New Media

Friday fun is such an understatement for this little bit of audio genius, go listen to this dance remix of Sen Ted Stevens and his take on the internet.

Quote from the wired article

Seriously, if you like it why don’t you send this internet to your staff
Tip of the Hat: The Social Customer Manifesto

Update: Technorati just got 7.6M in funding so hopefully they will invest more in their technology - Tip of the Hat to Mashable.

We all know that Technorati is an important engine in the social media space, but it’s strange to me that it has held onto that place without really evolving very much over the last year or so. It still seems a little technically slow to evolve, i mean how about some “tag clusters” like Flickr did a year ago. How about categorizing the top 100, I mean seriously, a blog is not really category any more is it? How about some more tools to explore that influence?

Anyway, all I’m saying is Technorati is pretty good, but i think it holds more influence than it should, and that it had better watch out for upcoming tools that “monitor” the blogosphere.

Nielson is the 800 pound gorilla in the “metrics” space, and it’s sidling into Technorati territory with when it bought buzzmetrics and rolled out “blog pulse” tools that include a top 100, a conversation tracker, and blogger profiles. Although, here’s a little blogpulse trend graph to show how influential Technorati is when compared to blogpulse, and pubsub (yes there are three lines on the graph, look close):

So why is Technorati so influential? Well I think they did a good job of providing some tools and a framework, and let the community do the work. Tags are a way for bloggers to categorize themselves and place themselves in a hierarchy.

Tags also provide a way for bloggers to identify themselves as part of a broader meme, a broader conversation if you like. Bloggers also get to claim their blogs, and add additional information and context around it. In the end Technorati is a co-creative engine that helps manage creativity that is happening at the “edges”, and it’s certainly continueing to do that with it’s work in the microformat space.

My point here is that other companies are moving into a space that Technorati should own, because if blog pulse or pubsub actually figure out a way to be a part of the community and provide technology that works reliably then we will all be talking about the blogpulse 100 or the pubsub 1000 (looks like they havn’t figured out how to remove splogs, all the top 10 are .info crap). They do position it as “most influential media”, based upon it’s linking algorithm, problem is that linking algorithm is so opaque that it’s almost meaningless to me. Add to that, I can’t link to my own rating, or compare myself to sites that I think are more relevant to me, or embed my “pubsub” top 1000 on my own blog, it’s no wonder everyone ignores it. What can I say, bloggers are vain…. why am I talking about this? Well i’m in the pubsub 1000 and that is much better than the Technorati 20,000

BTW The Co-Creative Business Show at CustomersOnFire.com just broke into the Technorati 100,000:

1. Enter Zefranks I knows me some ugly myspace pages competition
2. Go watch Brookers doing the united states of whatever (BTW she might make it to MTV before amanda gets in the mainstream)
3. Go and watch a video that shows amazing TextMate Blogging functionality, I love this guys accent, where is he from?
4. Watch a CaveOfCheeseBurgers do an impression of Yoda Farting
5. Watch a mashup of yoda and Jar Jar doing “who’s on first”
6. Watch this Great parody of the Mac vs PC commercials
7. Watch this Super Mario and Zidane headbuut mashup
8. How Snakes On a Plane really got made
9. How the line “there are mother fucking snakes on the mother fucking plane” got included

Not to go completely off topic here, but clearly there is a storm in the blogosphere about Zidane and I think this little clip on youtube from the France Vs. Brazil game kind of sums up why people care, enjoy:

Oh, and this is a stunning collection as well: