Monday, June 26, 2006

Digg 3.0 Alive & Well



Digg.com is one of my favorite sites. It's the pioneer of the “democratic editorial control” model. While sites like Google News and Yahoo! use algorithms to determine which news stories are most popular and should be placed on the home page, Digg.com empowers readers to vote and “digg” on which stories receive top placement. Digg calls this user powered content. How nice.

Digg.com is very popular with the technology community. (You can see that influence in the content that’s on the home page. Remember it’s the readers that selected it.) Digg.com’s traffic stats rival that of more traditional sites like NYTimes.com, with over 800,000 unique visitors a day and 9 million plus page views.

This (Monday) morning, Digg.com 3.0 launched. The new Digg continues to showcase users’ editorial selections in technology but will now include “containers” for broader subject categories as well – including entertainment, world & business, gaming, science and online video. Digg’s going mainstream and looking to take a chunk out of YouTube.com at the same time.

With site traffic to Digg doubling every two months, expect to see more – much more - of Digg and also expect to see more news aggregator sites embrace the “user editorial control” model.

What does this mean for PR? It means we must ensure we are diligent in the online communities, getting key influencers to show preference for our stories. In the democratic editorial control model, stories that get “voted off the island” by the influencers will never reach the larger audiences.

Check out Digg.com v.3.0 here.

-aB

Interesting, Albeit Inaccurate Web Site Demographic Tool



Want to know who Microsoft THINKS is looking at a particular Web site? This tool, part of Microsoft’s AdLabs project, tries to tell you. I’m not sure how exactly it works, but it was pretty close for some of my client projects.

Of course, it’s way off on others. Try seeing who Microsoft thinks is using Google. Click the URL button then type in www.google.com.

Interesting. Check it out here.

Thanks to Digg.com for the link.

-aB