The only positive to Digg’s new redesign
September 1, 2010
Evidently there is one positive outcome for the new Digg redesign. They didn’t import over the Microsoft imposed site ban list.
Literally to the joy of Linux users, the site sqlspace.com (The one Digg banned back in 2007 for hosting a screen shot of Ubuntu being featured on Windows Marketplace.) is now allowed to be submitted.
It was a censorship case that Digg was standing on the wrong side of, but of course they had to do as their Microsoft sponsor required. That meant for a period of roughly 5 months there were no negative stories about Microsoft, and all stories that were submitted were either buried or literally banned. Such as Sqlspace.com for hosting the below screenshot.
Enjoy the new reality.
Digg’s new design – epic failure
August 30, 2010
Open Letter to Digg and Kevin Rose,
This letter is on behalf of the millions of Digg users that were greeted on Monday to the latest news on Reddit.
Seriously, attached is the below screenshot of Digg in it’s full glory.
Kevin, If I wanted to go to reddit.com, I would have went to reddit.com. Digg has turned into an RSS reader… and honestly Google News is way better than what you are providing.
I strongly urge you to stop wasting your time and switch back to the former format, buggy as it was, it still wasn’t something that was completely fed by a reddit RSS reader. Something I already have as a Firefox bookmark.
This design is a complete epic failure and most likely will reduce Digg to a forum level trafficked site similar to something like SqlSpace.Com
It was fun while it lasted.
IE 8 – “Optimized for Digg”
November 6, 2009
Open Letter to Microsoft and Digg,
We are aware of the Advertising relationship between both your respective firms. That being stated, stop treating us like idiots.
See below Screenshot
Digg Fires 10% of workforce
January 22, 2009
Breaking – Digg has fired 10% of its workforce, and hammered their sales team replacing mass numbers of them. The company blog put this spin to it.
“given the current economic climate, we’ve made the decision to take a more conservative approach …. This means we’ll be taking proactive measures to manage our costs including a headcount reduction in certain areas that are less core to this year’s objectives”
In fact, Digg has fired 10% of their workforce and fired their entire sales staff. Digg has been living in a bubble over the past few years basking in VC money and not really exposed to Recession / Depression whatever you wish to call the economic disaster we are living in.
However their investors are screaming “make a profit” and Diggs solution is to start handing out pink slips. Their major cash cow is Microsoft, a company that just fired 5000 people a few hours ago.
If your major client just dumped 5000 people on the street it’s one hell of a warning sign that your firm is in trouble.
This is what our economy looks like.
No revenue model Twitter takes out Digg in traffic
January 20, 2009
No-Revenue Model Twitter takes out Digg in Traffic according to Hitwise. This doesn’t surprise us considering all the controversy with Digg, and editorial review for content from Microsoft. So of course this was bound to happen.
The problem we have isn’t really with Digg however, at least Kevin Rose is a paid shill for Microsoft and admits it…. the keyword being paid. The problem we have is with Twitter having massive amounts of traffic and no revenue model to speak of.
There comes a point where the VC dries up, and during the great depression part II you see no more sources of income. Hence the problem.
If Twitter does not find a revenue model, they will eventually have two choices, we doubt they can apply for TARP money.
1 – shut down
2 – find someone to buy them and let them have the problem of finding a revenue model.
So what do you do with millions upon millions of 140 character messages? How do you turn that into money?
Well… the ideas being floated out there are to charge companies to put on a recommended follow list. Might work… considering Dell has been eeking millions from twitter using it as direct mail piece to advertise their specials.
That might work, but don’t think that that will cover their massive SMS charges (like a cell phone carrier will give Twitter an unlimited account for 20 bucks a month.. heh).
We predict eventually they will start charging for their end users when they feel they have met critical mass. Now this might work to an extent as long as the monthly bill is something tiny… like a dollar a month.
5 million users at a dollar a month is 60 million a year (throw in the sponsorships listed above.. you might break 80 million)… the problem they will have is keeping 5 million users paying a dollar a month.. The biggest fear is mass exodus from twitter the second they start charging. It’s not like it’s difficult to setup a competitor. We setup one in a test environment using wordpress, plugins and a download theme.. meaning that the costs to entry are low… really low if you don’t send out too many of those costly SMS.
Twitter is on to something, the problem is we don’t want that something to be bankruptcy.
Twitter’s new logo!
UNKNOWN*** royally screws up — get’s thrown on main page of Digg
November 16, 2008
EDIT RETRACTION: We initially thought this was the work of CP+B … however it appears it was NOT their work.. (though they do work for Microsoft, it appears it’s limited to other areas) … What agency did this work?
This is bad considering it’s currently on the main page of Digg. .. Some Agency has Microsoft Windows Vista promotional ads.. well.. displaying Apple Notebooks and PlayStation joysticks.. Good Job whoever this firm is…
We know many of you don’t feel this is a big deal, as with Enfatico using Apple Machines for Dell’s account… but this… this is amazing stuff…
Google to Buy Digg for $200 Million
July 23, 2008
Google is on the verge of snapping up news aggregator Digg for a reported $200m as the search giant continues to bolster its news service… rumors all over the place… today appears to be rumor day…. story developing… Digg and Google refuse to reply to any of our inquires… Other outlets are picking this up as well…
Regardless this is the 4th time we have heard this rumor today… take it for what it’s worth.
Pretty funny to see Google using Microsoft Ads on Digg however…
Digg admits they manually Bury Stories
June 26, 2008
We were leaked a response from Digg regarding an editor that had his story go popular .. for 6 seconds.
Excerpt from the Editor’s e-mail to Digg:
My popular count in my profile increased by 1.
I do not believe the story was buried.
Digg’s Response:
Thanks for taking the time to contact us at Digg.com.
The Digg.com Team did in fact bury the story do to website redundancy.
We want to stress that the article in question was not ‘redundant’ the source was. Meaning that the same news outlet just happened to publish two breaking news stories…
We have heard of Digg manually burying stories.. such as the HD-DVD fiasco… but this… because the same news outlet published two breaking news stories… IE: the reporters at the outlet did their job and broke two news stories got buried…
Digg in the past has banned sites such as SqlSpace.Com for publishing a screen shot of Ubuntu being on Windows Market Place. That was censorship.. this is flatly stating that Digg users are too ‘stupid’ to make their own decisions on what is a good story.. and what isn’t.
If Digg had any morals, they would let this go popular since Digg is a community driven site that should respect the wishes of their community.
If the Digg users feel the story is worthless, then please allow them to bury it.. not some individual at Digg that feels that their users are not intelligent enough to make their own decisions on what story is good.. and what isn’t.
It’s an insult to all of us.
If this isn’t stopped now – It’s the end of Digg
June 14, 2008
This will be the end of Digg if this is allowed to happen. This is a snippet from the article posted on the Drudge Retort. The initial source article was buried on Digg… and perhaps because it really didn’t explain the ramifications of this issue…
The fact is if this happens.. Digg is toast.. burying that article was akin to trying to stuff an elephant under a rug.. if this is not exposed… the site you found this story on won’t exist in its current format.
IN short, what happened was simple, The Drudge Retort takes a sentence as a headline, then a few sentences describing the news story.. and then a link to the AP source.. (or whatever source it is… a blog, another news company, wired magazine, engadget, gizmodo … you get the idea). However the AP called that copyright infringement and offered a take down notice to Drudge Retort… This is nearly identical to the format used on Digg for a large amount of the stories.. meaning that if this succeeds.. Digg is under direct threat… as well as other popular forums such as SqlSpace, slashdot and even simple sites like the Drudge Report are under threat..
If this succeeds you are not even really allowed to copy a headline for a link… virtually the basis of how the majority of people submit articles to Digg and others. This needs to stop now… or else you are going to see the entire basis of how many of us obtain news from social sites, forums or blogs will be under direct threat.
AP Files 7 DMCA Takedowns Against Drudge Retort
I’m currently engaged in a legal disagreement with the Associated Press, which claims that Drudge Retort users linking to its stories are violating its copyright and committing “‘hot news’ misappropriation under New York state law.” An AP attorney filed six Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown requests this week demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment.
The Retort is a community site comparable in function to Digg, Reddit and Mixx. The 8,500 users of the site contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles — ranging in length from 33 to 79 words — and five of the six have a user-created headline.
Digg has been down for hours
June 12, 2008
Digg’s network is still unreachable as of 9:30 EST on Thursday June 12, 2008. It has been down for several hours. It’s not just that HTTP is down, you can’t even ping the servers. I bet Microsoft is upset as their advertising provider…
Pinging digg.com [64.191.203.30] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 64.191.203.30:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 0, Lost = 2 (100% loss),
Why do we care? Because our story was upcoming heading right to the main page when the site went down… oh well.. life goes on…
Recognized by Advertising Age Magazine as top Power 150 news outlet for Advertising and Marketing.
Recognized and listed in Google News. Don't stress, we're Satire
Ad Agency Advertising
