Sep 11th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
My friend Muhammad Saleem — a top Netscape submitter — just dropped me a note to say that the former Digg-style Netscape social-news site will be reborn at some future date at a site called Propeller.com. Tom Drapeau has a somewhat lacklustre post on the move over at the Netscape blog (at least Jason Calacanis knew how to market something with a little energy).
Muhammad — who was more than a little ticked at Mike Arrington and others for what he saw as an overreaction to the news that Netscape was changing — says he likes the branding. I’m okay with it, for what it’s worth, but I’m not clear on what Propeller is supposed to convey really. There’s also no timeline on when the site will go live, which kind of makes me wonder why they bothered. Why not wait until it’s ready to go?
I know Muhammad thinks people rang the death knell for Netscape too early, but I still wonder how many people are going to switch over to the new site. For whatever reason, I think the name Netscape had a certain drawing power, and it got lots of traffic in part because it used to be a portal. To start over with a new site and name is going to be an uphill climb, I think.
Sep 7th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Although we had some advance warning that this might be happening — courtesy of a post from Mike Arrington at TechCrunch that was denied by Netscape at the time — it’s still kind of sad that AOL is pulling the plug on its social-news experiment at Netscape.com.
The note at the Netscape site says that the Digg-style interface is merely moving to another location (Mike said he heard reports that it would be wow.com, another AOL-owned site). But it seems obvious that interest in the idea is waning, and the focus has shifted back to making Netscape into the news portal it used to be, primarily for the ad dollars. According to the site:
“We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.”
I know there will be a lot of gloating over this move — particularly from those who don’t like Jason Calacanis — but I think it’s unfortunate. Even if it was in essence a “Digg-clone,” I still think (as I have said from the beginning) that Netscape introduced some useful features to the social media model, including the use of editors to promote and add to stories, and the somewhat controversial decision to pay top submitters.
For whatever reason, Netscape just never seemed to be able to get much traction, so we will never know if any of those features makes sense for a social news site — and that’s a shame.
Update:
Muhammad Saleem, a Netscape “scout,” says in his post on the announcement that he’s shocked at how some blogs have mis-reported the news as the closure of Netscape — and he has a point. But I think even if the site remains at a different location, it seems obvious that its star has dimmed somewhat in the AOL universe, as HMTKSteve notes in his comment at Muhammad’s blog.
Dec 7th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
If nothing else, Jason Calacanis did one thing while he was running the revamped Netscape.com: By hiring away some of the top users at Digg, he ignited a debate about whether to compensate the top submitters to a “social media” site. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose said that he would never pay top Diggers because it would ruin the open and social nature of the site, and I tend to agree with him (I wrote about it here and here).
But now, according to Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, some of the top Diggers have found other ways of getting compensated — including getting paid by companies under the table for submitting their pages to the site. Several top submitters have reportedly been approached by companies to submit pages for money, and have done so. Some have been paid per submission, others on a kind of retainer, and some have received bonuses if a submission makes it to the front page.
This kind of thing is even more underhanded than PayPerPost, the company that pays bloggers to write about clients, but doesn’t require them to disclose it. But Tony says that some of the Diggers justify their illicit salaries by saying “If Kevin Rose isn’t going to pay me for my time, maybe someone else will.” Tony says that this reminds him of Third World countries where government officials take bribes in part because they are paid so little to do their jobs.
All of this tends (although I hate to admit it) to support my friend Rob Hyndman’s contention that top Diggers should be compensated because what they do is effectively work, and that Jason Calacanis recognized that and rewarded it (Rob’s thoughts can be found in the comments here, and in his post here). My argument has always been that Diggers get rewarded in other ways that are non-financial — they get bragging rights, for example, and the admiration of their peers, which in some cases is worth more than money.
But Rob’s point is that this shouldn’t preclude them getting paid as well. And obviously, some top Diggers agree, to the point where they are willing to take what amount to bribes to submit things. To some extent, this is probably inevitable — if there is a system, someone will find a way to game it.
Update:
Steve O’Hear, who writes a blog on social media for ZDNet, wrote something asking whether Digg users should be compensated, and then submitted his piece to Digg. It got about 90 Diggs and 40 comments, and made it to the front page — but then it suddenly disappeared.
Nov 27th, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
BusinessWeek blogger Rob Hof stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest in the social-media sphere with a recent post about what he sees as the drawbacks of a site like Digg, and how he has dumped it and gone back to Techmeme — a site that aggregates and ranks blog posts on various tech topics. Like many Digg critics, Rob’s main point seems to be that the posts are lame.
Rob mentions how others have come to the same conclusion, including venture capitalist Jeff Nolan. Former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble has unsubscribed from Digg because he says there is just too much crap. With my usual flair for the coinage of new terms, I like to call this the “too much crap” problem, or TMC for short.
There’s no question that the signal-to-noise ratio, as engineers like to call it, is sometimes frustratingly low at Digg and other aggregators. But is Techmeme.com that much better? It uses an algorithm that founder Gabe Rivera continually tweaks to sort and rank the different posts, but it also uses a “wisdom of crowds” approach, in that bloggers themselves are the ones who decide — by linking — which blog posts get pushed to the top.
Techmeme has its share of critics, however (including Jeremy Zawodny), who argue that it is a blogosphere echo chamber, with the same small group of blogs always at the top (solution: quit linking to them so much). So while Digg is criticized for being too inane and full of crap, Techmeme gets slammed for not being inclusive enough. When Digg does do some of what might you might call “editing,” (as Muhammad Saleem describes here), it gets criticized for not being the voice of the people.
Sounds like two ends of the same spectrum to me. Too much moderation or not enough? Too open, so that any moron can link (or bury) something, or too closed and restrictive? I think we are still looking for the right model. Digg, meanwhile, is also getting criticized for using misleading traffic stats. And my friend and former journalist — now at the b5media blog network — Mark Evans has some thoughts about Digg and the future of social media.
Nov 22nd, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
Came across a great post by Niall Kennedy — thanks to a link from my friend Om Malik — in which Niall digs deep beneath a recent story on weight-loss tips that got posted to the front page of Digg and finds what appears to be a series of connections to offshore spam blogs. More and more, this kind of thing is infiltrating social news engines like Digg and Netscape.
To Niall’s credit, he doesn’t just stop at noting that the story posted was classic “Digg bait” (since it mentioned dieting for computer geeks), but drills down to find out that it came from a blog whose main focus appears to be dental services, and then goes further to check where the blog’s domain was registered — and gives anyone interested a brief overview of link-spam practices and tactics, including CPMs for keywords involving dentistry, which is why the fake blog focused on that area.
Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life and Dr. Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests — two of the most insightful bloggers writing about social media right now — each have a take on the news, which comes on the heels of the recent fake news story about a Sony PlayStation recall that made it to Digg’s front page. In a nutshell, both Tony and Muhammad are of the opinion that sites like Digg need more human moderation to counteract such attempts.
