Digg has legions of followers. They're quite fanatical. The similar service Reddit doesn't have that type of following.

But how many of the Digg fantatics know how Digg works anyways? There's some type of "algorithm" that controls what hits the homepage. Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have hinted to that it involves who is digging what, the rate at which the stories are dugg, and we think that it involves something with the space time continium. That and what side of the bed MC Hammer wakes up on.

But nobody really knows but Digg.

Today, the #1 competitor to Digg, Condé Nast's Reddit, says "Screw you guys, we're going transparent". That's not an actual quote, but the company's actions say that in a nutshell.

Condé Nast is opening up Reddit's codebase to developers, your moms and dads, your pet fish, and whoever else has a computing device hooked up to the interwebs.

As we reported earlier, Yahoo! Buzz is now in public beta. Buzz is similar to Digg in that it lets users promote/demote ("Buzz") content to the top of the metaphoric hive. However, currently only publishers involved in the beta can have content submitted to the site, which makes Buzz (much) more restricted than Digg.

Yahoo says that they have "members of their team" choose promoted stories to appear on the Yahoo homepage, but they do not choose what appears on the Buzz site. Like Digg, Buzz uses an algorithm to determine a story's "Buzz Score" based on number of votes, number of times the story is shared, and the number of search results for the story's subject matter.

If you want to start Buzz-ing, you'll need a Yahoo account. Then, like Digg, click the voting button next to the story to promote a story. Oddly you can also submit stories directly to other social news sites (including Digg). You won't yet be able to view your voting history, and Buzz lacks "community features" like seeing what your friends have Buzz-ed. Oh, and you can't comment on stories on the Buzz site.

So if you want a featureless Digg clone with stories coming only from a specific set of sources, then try Buzz now! But hey, it's still in beta.

[Via PC Pro - Computer Buyer]

Digg has a problem. What was once a haven of obscure, insightful, and breaking news has become a cesspool of dated headlines, generic brand commentary, and fan-boy-blog spam. What happened? Why do the vast majority of front page links come from "popular" websites who feature a prominent "digg it" button on every article? Is there some conspiracy afloat? Is digg rewarding websites that send them a lot of traffic?

Can we demand a recount?

Sadly no. Digg's problem isn't one of cronyism or corruption, it is far worse. Digg has always been a poorly planned community. There, we said it.

To make matters worse, digg's phenomenal growth illustrates its own failure. If it were a nation, we would call it a failing state with a bumming population. A population easily and unwittingly manipulated by the craftiness of other large and powerful websites.

Need proof?

Of the 15 front page articles this morning:

• 7 were from popular blogs that featured the familiar "digg it" badge
• 5 were from popular sites that featured a prominent submit to digg button
• 2 were from popular mainstream news sites
• 1 was from a small town newspaper.
  

The problem really starts on the upcoming page. Here digg's increasing popularity attracts far more submissions than the diggers on the upcoming page can handle. A random check reveals 34 new links in the last two minutes. In another two minutes those links will be buried on the 4th or 5th page having never received a digg. A visit to page 40 in the upcoming queue reveals only one link that has garnered more than 3 diggs, and that link is from a popular website with the (you guessed it) digg it button at the top of the page.

How could this happen? Have diggers simply stopped caring about their own community?

Ever wonder what you're missing if you read Digg every morning but skip the New York Times? Or vice versa? The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a study comparing stories on user-driven news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us with mainstream news. Here's what they found:

• Most of the top stories on Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us were not top stories in the mainstream media.
  
• There's little follow-up on user-driven sites. A story pops up once, and then disappears.
• User news sites draw from different sources than mainstream media, with many stories linking to blogs and popular websites.
• Different user news sites are strong in different areas. Reddit is the most likely to include political stories, Digg is good for tech news, while Del.icio.us is kind of all over the place.
• Mainstream news sites were more likely to cover international news than the user-driven sites.

The study covered one week in June, but the results seem pretty realistic to us. The one thing we'd point out though is that user-driven "news" sites are often devoid of actual independent reporting. You can learn a lot by reading the comments on Digg or Slashdot. But most of the articles are actually links to original reporting done by mainstream media or articles written and published on other blogs or news sites.

Social news sites aren't replacing traditional media. They're replacing the editor's judgment of what news should go on the paper's front page. While a wider range of topics might make the front page of Reddit than The New York Times, if you want consistent quality and editorially sound articles written by people who make a living reporting the facts, you might not want to rely on Digg readers to deliver all your news.

[via Search Engine Land]

AOL has announced that it will be shifting Netscape.com from a social news site to a standard news portal. You know, the kind of news portal that lived at the site before AOL decided to turn it into a page filled with user-submitted news stories and links.

Apparently AOL research shows that people do want a social news site, but people also associated the Netscape brand with traditional news. AOL is this blog's parent company, but we have not seen any research on this matter, so we're left to make wild speculation.

And we have to say, we're not sure we see the logic. For more than a year, Netscape has a been a social news site. Are you telling us that people who had visited Netscape more than a year ago still continue to type "www.netscape.com" into their web browsers due to some sort of muscle memory, expecting to find an old fashioned news portal? And really, as far as we can tell, people associate the name Netscape more with a web browser they didn't know still exists (it does, seriously), than with news.

Anyway, AOL recently launched a new Netscape landing page, which will eventually be what you see when you visit Netscape.com. And yes, we know it looks a lot like the Yahoo! home page. The social news site will survive, but AOL hasn't yet determined where it will move to.

With all the news recently about the giant fiasco concerning toys being created using lead contents, there is no better time to ensure your child's safety. Many parties can have fingers pointed at them in this matter, but let's forget about who is to blame for a second and just make sure that the toys our children are playing with are safe.

SaferToys is a digg like social news site that lists out all stories relating to the safety, recalls, and news on the latest unsafe toys. It's an easy place for concerned parents to check in with and track the latest unsafe toys. Stories can be submitted and voted on so they rise to the top of the news list. Users can also share their insights via comments on each story submitted.

SaferToys uses the Pligg platform, an open source social content management system that lets users submit, vote and comment on stories.

[via ehub]

Ever wonder how Netscape's social news site stacks up to the reigning king Digg? Neither have we. However, an industrious young Netscape user decided to lay the numbers out for all to see and peruse.

The results are less than surprising. Although Netscape has done somewhat well for itself since it's launch this time last year, it still lags far behind Digg in raw traffic numbers.

However, if you "digg" a little deeper, some interesting trends appear. Netscape's users view more pages per visit than Digg's, and spend more time on the site as well. From an advertising perspective, this is pure gold.

The social news wars are far from over, although they have settled down a bit from the peak. Will Netscape hang on long enough to really cash in? Only time will tell.

Avanoo is a brand-spanking new community wisdom mining system that may one day knock your socks off with its ability to gain insight into tough questions. We've got 100 public beta invites to throw our readers so, hop in and comment on the Wisdom of Communities to get your ticket to ride!

Social news has been all the rage among the tech-savvy but, it's failed to hit home with the everyman. Digg and Reddit are massively popular with the geek set -- the place to be if you want to know what a tech heavy male between 18 and 24 thinks -- but, what about everyone else?

Enter Avanoo. Not a social news site, not really a social networking site, Avanoo is something different. Collecting the wisdom of its community, Avanoo is poised to give you some amazing insight into what everyone thinks, or what a tiny demographic based slice of everyone thinks.

It works like this; Avanoo users ask questions with finite numbers of answers, which are then posed to the community of Avanoo users. Answers are collected and available for the community to view. Simple enough? Sure, but this is where it starts to become seriously cool. In the style of "give a little to get a little", Avanoo users can mine the polling data they've helped create by giving a little data of their own. Want to know how 18-24 year olds felt? Give your own age. Want to know how people with an income below $30,000/year feel? Give your own income.

Avanoo's president Dan Jacobs tells me it's all about perspective, "The wisdom of crowds fails because the crowd has no perspective, the wisdom of experts fails because the expert doesn't share your perspective." Avanoo essentially allows you to define the perspective, "the lens" if you will, through which you want to view the world; Something that a whole host of social news sites have failed to do.

The brilliance in Avanoo is its simplicity; it's an idea which makes you smack your head and wonder, "Why didn't I think of that." Avanoo enters public beta today, and anticipates that it will soon be open to in excess of 10,000 users.

The open source Pligg makes throwing up a Digg clone easy enough for most basic web developers but, once it's up and running, what happens? Building a social-news community is hard work; it takes time, dedication and, in great degree, luck.

If you've got Pligg on the brain and you're planning to become the next social-news mogul, a quick read-through of these 8 myths about launching a Pligg site is a great place to start. It may dash you're hopes and dreams but, better to dive well informed and headlong into a new project than to wander blindly and hold expectations that may not match reality.

If you're still not dissuaded from your quest to become a social news baron, the Pligg forums can help you weather the inevitable hardships you'll face along the way.

The wires are reporting that MySpace is set to launch its social news feature today. As of this morning, the site was still inaccessible to the public, but Wired managed to snag a couple of screenshots last month.

MySpace News will let users determine which stories make it to the front page through a ranking system, much like Digg, Reddit or Netscape. But MySpace New won't rely entirely on user submissions.

The service will also scan news sites and blogs looking for stories to feature on the site. But user input will be key in determining which stories make it to the front page of MySpace News.

Following the Google News example, MySpace News will feature headlines, a one paragraph description and a link to the full article. We'll be starting an office pool shortly on how long it will take for content producers to start suing MySpace.

News aggregator Topix has moved away from its Google News-like roots and adopted a slightly more Digg-like model. The company has traditionally taken a top-down approach to news, providing users with links to newspaper articles from around the country. Starting today, Topix will instead implement a bottom-up approach, by asking users to submit relevant news stories in local, national, international, sports, and entertainment sections.

Users who sign up for the service will be able to submit local news clips or original stories through the web site or from a cellphone. When there's nobody around to submit or edit news, a "roboblogger" posts links to newspaper articles.

Right now, most of the content on the site seems to be links to mainstream news articles, with very few articles written by users. But the goal isn't necessarily to turn Topix into a repository of user generated news overnight. Rather the goal appears to be to get users to have more meaningful interactions with the site.

While Topix gets about 10 million unique visitors a month, most just look at a few articles through the site and then move on, not the best way to generate advertising revenues. Adding social features to the site will give users a reason to spend more time on Topix.

Microsoft has jumped on the social news bandwagon, creating two websites with a digg like social voting style. One for Norwegian consumers, the other for French Belgians.

The sites let users submit news, headlines, and blog postings that other users can vote on. Similar to the Digg and Netscape models, users check out the latest stories while voting and commenting on their favorites. Users can subscribe to story feeds via RSS and through their Live.com personal site.

If these sites pan out and are popular among users, Microsoft could end up working on more country specific sites once the model is tested and refined.

If you've ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg's homepage, you've enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it's certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.

But how valuable is digg traffic, really, and is the digg community one that we should even care about? Unfortunately, after observing the digg community for about a year, I'd have to conclude no, it's not. Now, at this point I should point out that AOL owns Weblogs Inc, who own Download Squad, and AOL also owns Netscape, recently converted into a social news and media voting site that is in many ways similar to digg. So if you don't think I can be objective about this, you might want to just skip this post. But I'm not here to sing the praises of Netscape over digg either. Overall, I'm not certain that social media sites like Netscape, digg, reddit, del.icio.us, or even the granddaddy of them all - Slashdot - will have any relevance whatsoever in five years.

Okay, so now that I've condemned a whole class of website, or really a whole class of online community, I should point out that while digg drives the largest amount of traffic of the bunch, the community at digg is actually rotting from the inside out.

This is a very inflammatory statement to make, but all it takes is to browse through the comments on few random frontpage posts at digg, and you'll see what I mean. The sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming, and makes digg a place that is not only not fun to visit, it's certainly not a place to "share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you", as digg's tagline optimistically claims.

While social media sites seem to be the future of web site aggregation, at least one element of it, there's one aspect of these sites that is starting to get annoying. Have you noticed some of your favorite sites adding a row and sometimes multiple rows of links to social news sites, ostensibly to make it easy for visitors to bookmark or save the site on del.icio.us, digg, netscape, reddit, furl, or any number of other sites of this ilk. Of course, there's also a myriad of service-specific RSS links, so that users of Bloglines, Google Reader, NewsGator, Netvibes, etc. can click on one link and subscribe to the site in the reader of their choice. The thing is, I'm not sure people even use these buttons, particularly when they're all grouped together; they've simply become litter online.

Well, if you're someone that wants to offer your users the ability to easily subscribe to or bookmark your site, but want to avoid littering your site with all of these site-specific icons, check out Add This. Add This allows you to put a single image link on your site to take your readers to a dedicated bookmarking site page, and another for feed readers. Once there, they can choose the service they'd like to use, and perform the function they're looking to do. On one hand, all this seems to be doing is cleaning up your pages by putting all the site-specific links on an intermediate page - something you could arguably do yourself. But there's more to the Add This service, which makes it more compelling.

Add This aggregates statistics about which pages and site features your readers are collecting in their bookmark collections the most, and provide that data back to you. Assuming the web viewing population uses these links more than I think they do, this could provide some very valuable information as to what people are truly finding interesting on your site. Personally, I'm still a bit skeptical as to the need for all of these site-specific links. If this trend continues at the rate it's been going, ad blocking software will also be blocking social media bookmarking links just to provide a cleaner interface for web users. Hey, it's a thought.

This one's for all you Windows-using digg fans out there. For awhile now Mac users have had a swanky little application called DiggUpdate that presents a tidy little window with information about the status of the articles you submit to digg on your desktop. I've seen many comments from Windows users begging for something similar for Windows, and now their wish has come true. DiggUpdate is now available in both Mac and Windows flavors.

Of course you digg users are also using Netscape, right? Social news is the way of the future!