Dave this is a great idea and something I am sure selected people would use and participate in. O had assumed some of the blog networks were already using internal digg like systems already
alojamentoweb
· 4 months ago
Didn't Netscape try something like this a few years ago? "Experts" aggregating news or some such. Seems to have gone tits up.
Shivanand
· 2 years ago
Take it a step forward, and build a distributed system, that will allow the author's themselves to see what is happening in the digg like sub-systems. Build a digg out of multiple digg-like sub-systems and then you have the best of both worlds (thousands of editors, but ability to just subscribe to some if you want some only) :)
dblanar
· 2 years ago
Can't wait to see some of the ideas you've already been privvy to.
I've been thinking hard about trying to create a commercial model for content distribution that uses a similar type of approach, something which can act as a proxy for value -- like a stock exchange. Or, maybe like the national power grid, where content - be it voice, data, audio or otherwise - can be uploaded, disseminated and viewed by any access point.
The friction points in the system is where money is exchanged, whilst letting the market dictate the unit value of content.
I know it's slightly crazy, but (clearly) the free model isn't sustainable and IMO our focus should be on creating efficient and fair mechanisms for content, regardless of where it comes from. In your example above, value is assigned by 'votes' from the community; seems putting a monetary value next to these votes is a logical next step.
Ryan
· 2 years ago
I've started something similar with my better half, but a much simpler version. We both opened up google reader accounts and added each others "shared feed". When we see an article we think the other might enjoy, we "share" it. This way we both aren't firing links around all day (disrupting workflows, etc.), and we actually share more stories as we know the other isn't forced to view the article.
I imagined this could scale out into something like what you're thinking, small community new sharing articles instead of feeding from the same massive (and now diluted) trough.
Adam Ostrow
· 2 years ago
This idea makes a lot of sense, and is sort of similar to the new direction we've taken at MindSay.com. We (there's two of us) recently decided to go the social news route, making our homepage a blog and letting users submit their own entries for consideration. We then sort through these entries and edit/link them with a consistent style. So far it seems to be going pretty well, with users submitting interesting stuff that seems to get a lot of comments.
Essentially, we took our existing community and tasked them with digging up news for us. Not everyone participates, but for those that do, it creates a news site with articles very relevant to them. I think you'll find a lot of success taking a similar approach to tech news.
kevin
· 2 years ago
I think we have a digg type service for bloggers to submit their blogs to and let the community rate them based upon the days posts. We are only around 7500 blogs right now. I'd be more than happy to send over the top fuelled blog post of the day if it helped uncover some new stories or new reads, as we are made up from relatively little known bloggers, you might find a use for a daily new find to submit an article?
It strikes me that this kind of system heakens back to the good old days of blogging, before it became about subscribers, page views and CPMs, and was simply about likeminded people sharing ideas.
@zscott
· 2 years ago
I think it would be amazing if a digg-like service could discover my interests and learn over time what I want to read. There might be some undiscovered people out there able to find things I'm interested in. I just finished reading Programming Collective Intelligence and techniques like clustering and bayesian inference are on my mind.
dave
· 2 years ago
I'm not so sure. I get links all the time from readers of Scripting News. If we had our own Digg-clone, that would just formalize the process, and allow people to share links without me having to be in the loop. I think there's a strong character to this community, and the "heart of gold" thing is very strong here, and the intelligence is off the scale. I think it depends on the community. Look at all the comments less than an hour after the initial post, and further look at the quality of the comments.
Matt Terenzio
· 2 years ago
I been to hollywood, I been to redwood, I cross the ocean for a heart of gold
andrewbaron
· 2 years ago
We started with Pligg and eventually started to adopt it into our own. I would reccomend checking it out as a starting point.
mark
· 2 years ago
Yes, Pligg is excellent. It's an open-source (PHP based) system for creating Digg clones. It has a neat optional module that lets you create new articles from RSS feeds, which helps to get a site going when there are not many submissions.
I got a site up in about 2 hours, starting from nothing.
Vitor Conceicao
· 2 years ago
How about mixing a digg like service with a social network? In that way you could use the degrees of proximity to weight the rating system in a way that articles submitted by "friends" ou "friends of friends" would be better rated than articles submitted by other people. Something like: An article from a friend would get a 10 weight, from a "friend of a friend: would weight 5 and from everyone else just 1.
In that way each person could have his own "trusted" editors and the service would keep being interesting and useful even if it grew exponentially.
dave
· 2 years ago
Of course. Digg is a social network, imho. There's no clear dividing line.
Uno de Waal
· 2 years ago
I think I understand what you mean... This would be really cool. Like a little "Send me a link" kind of button/widget.
Then the community also gets to vote on the articles, or see which articles are the coolest in your field. You would need quite a powerful community though, and also a dedicated one (thinking of the 1:10:90 rule). Then again, this might actually get a lot of people to send stuff in to you (as opposed to you having to give them your e-mail address).
I like this idea...
Then, if you build a distributed system, then you could perhaps aggregate all those links.
Philippe
· 2 years ago
Ok. I don't think we need another digg. I think we need a single digg that is a large as the web. An open protocol for digging - voting - on anything on the web. And then separately we have communities - lists of people or open ids - "social graphs" if you must use that term. So there could be a "Scripting News" community. Now you take that community and you apply all the open votes made by members of that community against the web and you get the web filtered and ranked by that community.
Or you apply all the votes by members of this community against the slices of the web - the political web, the tech web etc - and you get that slice of the web filtered, annotated by that community. Say the "Daily Kos" community filtering the conservative web or tech A-listers filtering stuff about Facebook.
Also - there are two types of votes and both already exist: implicit and explicit. Each time a blogger links to another blogger, or cites a source, that's a vote (implicit). And of course explicit votes already exist on digg etc.. Both types need to be integrated (implicit votes can be harvested thru an aggregator and digg needs to be opened up)
Salman FF
· 2 years ago
Philippe - I think the direction you are pointing towards is exactly right. Further, if we could 'own' (or control) the data around our explicit votes and our implicit attention, and syndicated it, any one could create a micro-digg based on their chosen community... and slide and dice those micro-diggs any way they wanted. Are you working on anything like this?
Philippe
· 2 years ago
@salman - No, I'm not really working on this but the site I created -blogrunner.com- uses this concept - its the web remixed and ranked by the web.
@alexh - digg is mashable but to accomplish what you want you'd have to map digg ids to twitter ids
AlexH
· 2 years ago
Phillipe, I was thinking about the exact same thing.
How mashable is Digg itself? Do they provide an API where I could filter out the vote, and only show things that people in my Twitter list have dugg?
Brian
· 2 years ago
Didn't Netscape try something like this a few years ago? "Experts" aggregating news or some such. Seems to have gone tits up.
Siliconverge.com is a place for people and news from semiconductor/hardware industry to converge together. Like Digg, our community will share, discover and discuss latest and greatest news & stories related to Semiconductor and allied industries from different sources on the web. Siliconverge.com is aiming to change the way people from semiconductor industry consume the information online.
I started Siliconverge.com 1. to filter out the signal related to Semiconductor and allied industries from other noise available on the web 2. to solve the frustration of keeping oneself up to date with different news sources of Semiconductor and allied industries 3. to find the latest and best stuff in the short time related to Semiconductor and allied industries on the web
I think, having a digg clone, which focuses on a strong niche domain, will add huge value to the reader community. Many people from Semiconductor world are still not highly exposed to Digg like system. They still follow old way of visiting 10 different news sources. Siliconverge.com has a high value proposition for such readers. I believe it's an untapped niche market.
Please let me know what do you think about Siliconverge.com and how can I get involved into your Digg-clone project idea. I'm very excited to know that you also believe that niche and relevancy are one of the core aspects that we should focus on.
Thanks, Aditya
Arnþór Snær
· 2 years ago
What about this. Imagine a site like Flickr, but with bookmarks instead of photos.
Sets, tags, groups!!
Crazy enough to work ay ?
phrakture
· 2 years ago
That sounds delicious
/me rolls his eyes
Arnþór Snær
· 2 years ago
If I'm not mistaken, there are no groups in delicious + the ui leaves something to be desired. I use delicious alot myself.
Nick Johnson
· 2 years ago
Interesting idea. I can see a 'digg hosting' service akin to blog hosting services being just as popular. Though I have to say, I do like the idea of a digg where the top stories are determined by your social network even better. Possibly an OpenSocial gadget? ;)
Ddonat
· 2 years ago
Hi Dave,
I know I am missing something so sorry if I'm being obtuse, but what value does this idea provide that actually improves substantially on our present RSS feed reader?
I already read your blog, Marc's, Fred's, Steve's, and a dozen more. These blogs already find (and generate) good content. They generally link and comment on news that I care about. They already filter-out huge amounts of news-noise. Will getting them as editors to a new mini/focused DIGG system really improve the quality of content that I receive?
Granted, I'm not an insatiable news hound. I can have it next day. In fact, the later I read about it on one of these blogs, the more likely the content is well filtered and relevant to me.
Henry
· 2 years ago
I think the best comparison for this kind of service is Ning, because it's basically describing a service that allows you to create social news services for smaller communities. I think this idea has a lot of potential. Digg/reddit/yc all have their niche, and while Digg tries to have many niches (tech, sports, etc), it can't service everyone. Tapping into the power of niche communities is very interesting; people enjoy links and articles from people they associate with most. Digg is mostly trying to cater to the base interests of the masses, and so there's a lot of room for smaller news sites, bent on a particular subject/group, to do well. The question is: can you really make this as powerful as Ning? Can you really make a service where anyone can make their own reddit/digg ?
Bill Seitz
· 2 years ago
How much value would the rating process add over TailRank's "My Tail" feature, which just reports items linked to by the people you select?
Ryan
· 2 years ago
The problem I see with this idea is that I can see it being monetized by offering commercials up as legitimate spots. This seems to be a problem with all forms of media even blogs. It seems like a lot of blogs I've been reading lately seem to just re-hash various press releases of tech companies (including many people you list as potential contributors) w/o anything insightful and usually downright ignorant about the actual facts of the tech involved. Just like newspapers will sometimes turn a sponsor's press-release into "news".
Joe
· 2 years ago
Good idea; kind of un-democratizing Digg.
It would also be great if the system could learn which editors I preferred (trust), and could give me a private label page (with a public RSS feed, of course) that emphasized those editors.
Think of it like OPML for digg clones. If you extrapolate the idea, everyone chooses their own set of 25 editors, or they can just use yours.
yaacov
· 2 years ago
Ha! I knew that's what you were looking to do. I'd love something like that for my friends so we don't have to keep emailing links around to each other.
aaronsw
· 2 years ago
We were working on this when I was at Reddit and indeed we launched it for Joel Spolsky -- see http://joel.reddit.com/
I don't know what happened to it; there's some possibility it'll launch soon now that they're done rewriting Reddit again.
Todd Gruben
· 2 years ago
Sign me up! Am I a blogger? no. Do I have a eye for good nuggets? I think so.
allen stern
· 2 years ago
I'd love to be involved somehow Dave.
kp
· 2 years ago
Is that what Techmeme type service provides to an existing reader base?
Kevin Martin O'Boyle
· 2 years ago
I like it; I've had similar thoughts; My snag is on choosing, promoting and demoting the elect. It seems there should be some clearly defined mechanism for determining whether the pundits really deserve their seat and conversely some mechanism that would allow a gifted outsider to be promoted into the pundit role. Otherwise it becomes little more than a blog for the pundits, no better or no worse than the collective views of the pundits (the editorial staff). you could call it something like, oh, I don't know, a trade magazine??? -- if you see my point.
TP
· 2 years ago
The facebook google shared reader app already does what you are talking about? Robert Scoble even wrote a post calling it the digg killer?
or, am i missing something?
RacerRick
· 2 years ago
A couple of folks use a very specific tag on delicious to bookmark articles, pages, posts, etc for each other. Each suggested link is supposed to have a synopsis (in the delicious description) so that it's not necessary to visit the page.
We took the delicious rss feed and made it into one big webpage.
It's a hack, but it works kinda like you are talking about - no voting, though.
greg
· 2 years ago
Dave, good to see you are still "Digging"
Mark Evansq
· 2 years ago
It's an interesting concept as a way for a small group of individuals to create something that meets their specific individual needs. The question is whether it would have staying power with a small group of supporters/users. The other issue is what happens if this service becomes so good that others start clamoring to be included? Would you keep it small or expand and risk being the victim of your own success. Nevertheless, this is the kind of project that could become more prevalent as people look to create their own personalized versions of online services.
anildash
· 2 years ago
This is one of the reasons we built the Community Solution for Movable Type (See http://movabletype.com/products/community-solut... ), because we were thinking along similar lines -- people need to be able to create small or constrained communities of interest, complete with all the features (voting/rating, profiles, etc.) that people expect from the other social sites they're using.
JG
· 2 years ago
We'd count on the judgement of these people to find us interesting news items, and be fair in deciding their relevance.
This sounds very Andrew Keen, or Nick Carr. And very anti-Web 2.0. Isn't the idea behind "Wisdom of Crowds" the notion that, as the crowd grows, the wisdom grows with it? If the opposite is true, that doesn't say very much for this O'Reilly Web 2.0 notion.
Jeremy
· 2 years ago
I just did a write up on this very subject today and then found this article. I miss digg. What we have now is the college drunken party version of a once respectable website. I've lost my passion for posting, reading and commenting there. I'd love to see a site that was like it was back then. Something where pertinent information can be found without having to sort through the hundreds of LOLcat pictures and Will it Blend videos. Where I can feel like I am part of a community and not an outsider looking in on a self implosion waiting to happen.
kid mercury
· 2 years ago
hey dave, i missed your original post. i'd love to build a community for you -- in fact it's exactly what i've been working on. check out my blog and you'll see what i'm talking about. i'm shooting you an email as well.
Shayan
· 2 years ago
Hi Dave, I have been following your blog for quite some time now, and am a very big fan of yours. I also had a Digg clone in mind and did extensive research on it... I never went ahead with my idea, but if there is anything I can help you with please let me know. I would be more than glad to help (@ no cost :)) shayan [at] dineorwine.com
FCrew
· 2 years ago
"I want starting a Digg-like community to be as easy as creating a weblog on blogger.com."
That's exactly what coRank (www.corank.com) does, Dave. The service has been covered all over the place (@ TechCrunch several times, R/W Web, Mashable...). I think you were the only one left! :-)
Ujj
· 2 years ago
Spot on. Could'nt agree more with the fact that digg is becoming more and more difficult to dig through. I usually spend more time sieving through articles than reading them.
Just one point though, arent you talking about a collective link blog of people like yourself, Scoble, Fred Wilson, Steve Rubel, Amyloo, Jim Posner, Lawrence Lee?
Rick Burnes
· 2 years ago
I like this idea. I'll be interested to see how it crystallizes.
Also, I'm surprised Digg hasn't done anything similar. Seems like they could by opening up their platform a bit more, no? Why aren't they going in this direction?
Anton Mannering
· 2 years ago
I agree absolutely with this idea. I started Luddity about a month ago as a way of keeping up to date with tech news by using the idea that the group of people I know in the tech community in Ireland all live in different spaces and thus would bring the news that they are interested in and the community could vote on it's relevance etc. I for instance am focused on social networking and online media. Another friend is working with mobile technology. I'm interested in what's going on in that space but can't track everything. This way we all benefit from a community with a certain level of expertise. I reckoned it could work with a communtiy of less than a hundred. Good luck with it anyway as I believe you're on to something. But I thought of it first... LOL
Leon Atkinson
· 2 years ago
I built the very thing you're talking about in 1998 for Clear Ink. The site was called The Link Conservatory. At the time I thought of it as a clone of Yahoo where the editors were the employees of our company. You can see captures of it in the Wayback Machine. http://web.archive.org/web/19991128190844/http:...
Doug Hellmann
· 2 years ago
The next step would be to build a site to allow *multiple* communities to do this. You, Steve, Om, and Scoble are interesing to some people, but another group would be more interesting to others.
jgraziani
· 2 years ago
This makes me smile -- even chuckle. I can imagine Ben Franklin discussing the same thing with the contemporaries of his day. It was called a newspaper back then. Everything old is new again. Best wishes for wonderful success -- I mean that sincerely.
Joe Lazarus
· 2 years ago
Dave, thought you would be interested in this news in case you haven't already seen it...
Pligg, the Digg clone software company, is about to release a service that lets anyone build their own Digg clone without programming skills.
Zhasper
· 1 year ago
Boing-boing, much?
gokhan
· 1 year ago
www.diggtr.com is the place to share your favorites and to communicate with others that share your interests.You are the editor and if your story is popular it will be published on the front page.
All Comments
i find alot of value in the Ycombinators digg clone:
http://news.ycombinator.com/
look forward to sharing our version of this soon.
I've been thinking hard about trying to create a commercial model for content distribution that uses a similar type of approach, something which can act as a proxy for value -- like a stock exchange. Or, maybe like the national power grid, where content - be it voice, data, audio or otherwise - can be uploaded, disseminated and viewed by any access point.
The friction points in the system is where money is exchanged, whilst letting the market dictate the unit value of content.
I know it's slightly crazy, but (clearly) the free model isn't sustainable and IMO our focus should be on creating efficient and fair mechanisms for content, regardless of where it comes from. In your example above, value is assigned by 'votes' from the community; seems putting a monetary value next to these votes is a logical next step.
I imagined this could scale out into something like what you're thinking, small community new sharing articles instead of feeding from the same massive (and now diluted) trough.
Essentially, we took our existing community and tasked them with digging up news for us. Not everyone participates, but for those that do, it creates a news site with articles very relevant to them. I think you'll find a lot of success taking a similar approach to tech news.
It strikes me that this kind of system heakens back to the good old days of blogging, before it became about subscribers, page views and CPMs, and was simply about likeminded people sharing ideas.
I got a site up in about 2 hours, starting from nothing.
In that way each person could have his own "trusted" editors and the service would keep being interesting and useful even if it grew exponentially.
Then the community also gets to vote on the articles, or see which articles are the coolest in your field. You would need quite a powerful community though, and also a dedicated one (thinking of the 1:10:90 rule). Then again, this might actually get a lot of people to send stuff in to you (as opposed to you having to give them your e-mail address).
I like this idea...
Then, if you build a distributed system, then you could perhaps aggregate all those links.
Or you apply all the votes by members of this community against the slices of the web - the political web, the tech web etc - and you get that slice of the web filtered, annotated by that community. Say the "Daily Kos" community filtering the conservative web or tech A-listers filtering stuff about Facebook.
Also - there are two types of votes and both already exist: implicit and explicit. Each time a blogger links to another blogger, or cites a source, that's a vote (implicit). And of course explicit votes already exist on digg etc.. Both types need to be integrated (implicit votes can be harvested thru an aggregator and digg needs to be opened up)
@alexh - digg is mashable but to accomplish what you want you'd have to map digg ids to twitter ids
How mashable is Digg itself? Do they provide an API where I could filter out the vote, and only show things that people in my Twitter list have dugg?
I agree with your views, and that's precisely why I started http://www.siliconverge.com in the last week.
Siliconverge.com is a place for people and news from semiconductor/hardware industry to converge together. Like Digg, our community will share, discover and discuss latest and greatest news & stories related to Semiconductor and allied industries from different sources on the web. Siliconverge.com is aiming to change the way people from semiconductor industry consume the information online.
I started Siliconverge.com
1. to filter out the signal related to Semiconductor and allied industries from other noise available on the web
2. to solve the frustration of keeping oneself up to date with different news sources of Semiconductor and allied industries
3. to find the latest and best stuff in the short time related to Semiconductor and allied industries on the web
I think, having a digg clone, which focuses on a strong niche domain, will add huge value to the reader community. Many people from Semiconductor world are still not highly exposed to Digg like system. They still follow old way of visiting 10 different news sources. Siliconverge.com has a high value proposition for such readers. I believe it's an untapped niche market.
Please let me know what do you think about Siliconverge.com and how can I get involved into your Digg-clone project idea. I'm very excited to know that you also believe that niche and relevancy are one of the core aspects that we should focus on.
Thanks,
Aditya
Sets, tags, groups!!
Crazy enough to work ay ?
/me rolls his eyes
I know I am missing something so sorry if I'm being obtuse, but what value does this idea provide that actually improves substantially on our present RSS feed reader?
I already read your blog, Marc's, Fred's, Steve's, and a dozen more. These blogs already find (and generate) good content. They generally link and comment on news that I care about. They already filter-out huge amounts of news-noise. Will getting them as editors to a new mini/focused DIGG system really improve the quality of content that I receive?
Granted, I'm not an insatiable news hound. I can have it next day. In fact, the later I read about it on one of these blogs, the more likely the content is well filtered and relevant to me.
It would also be great if the system could learn which editors I preferred (trust), and could give me a private label page (with a public RSS feed, of course) that emphasized those editors.
Think of it like OPML for digg clones. If you extrapolate the idea, everyone chooses their own set of 25 editors, or they can just use yours.
I don't know what happened to it; there's some possibility it'll launch soon now that they're done rewriting Reddit again.
Robert Scoble even wrote a post calling it the digg killer?
or, am i missing something?
We took the delicious rss feed and made it into one big webpage.
It's a hack, but it works kinda like you are talking about - no voting, though.
This sounds very Andrew Keen, or Nick Carr. And very anti-Web 2.0. Isn't the idea behind "Wisdom of Crowds" the notion that, as the crowd grows, the wisdom grows with it? If the opposite is true, that doesn't say very much for this O'Reilly Web 2.0 notion.
shayan [at] dineorwine.com
That's exactly what coRank (www.corank.com) does, Dave. The service has been covered all over the place (@ TechCrunch several times, R/W Web, Mashable...). I think you were the only one left! :-)
Just one point though, arent you talking about a collective link blog of people like yourself, Scoble, Fred Wilson, Steve Rubel, Amyloo, Jim Posner, Lawrence Lee?
Also, I'm surprised Digg hasn't done anything similar. Seems like they could by opening up their platform a bit more, no? Why aren't they going in this direction?
http://mashable.com/2007/12/19/pligg-fraxi/
Pligg, the Digg clone software company, is about to release a service that lets anyone build their own Digg clone without programming skills.