There’s an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about Digg, one of the core Web 2.0 web sites. Here’s the brief history and purpose of Digg according to the story:

What would happen if a Web site’s readers — instead of editors — could decide which stories should be published? Technology journalist Kevin Rose decided to find out. Two years ago he started a technology news site called Digg.com. The Web site lets users submit links to stories they recommend, along with brief summaries. Users also vote for submissions by clicking on a button labeled “digg it.” Each person can vote once per story. The most popular stories — determined by a formula the site doesn’t disclose, including factors like the number of votes received and the time of day — are automatically promoted to the site’s main page.

That sounds both visionary (particularly 2 years ago), useful and very much consistent with the move to the edge we’ve been talking about. All that makes it a little embarrassing for me to admit that I’ve never used Digg. Apparently I signed up in August 2005, because I have an account. But until today I’ve never explored or used it.

Let’s dig into Digg in real time and see what the big deal is. This is where multiple monitors and Firefox tabs become very handy.

Logging in and Profiling Up

I remembered my name and password after a couple of false starts. First stop, the Profile Page so I can fill in my particulars. There are three tabs there: Digging History (I don’t have any yet), Friends (I don’t have any of those either; I’d write Steve Rubel and ask if he’d be my friend, but he doesn’t read email from the hoi polloi so I better not) and Personal Profile.

Digging History shows what stories you have Dugg (more on that below). I am a man in need of a history, so I went back to the front page and saw some story bashing the RIAA’s cousin the MPAA. I dug it, so I Dugg it by clicking on the Digg icon. Clicking on the Digg item represents a vote for a story, which moves the story up the Digg list. When I clicked the Digg icon, the Digg number for that story immediately went up by 1 and a link to that story showed up in my Digging History. I now have a history.

Friends shows people you have added to your list of friends. You can search for friends by username, email address, name or location. I searched for Steve by name and email address and came up with nothing. Bummer. I did find Scoble (who I actually do consider a friend), but he hasn’t used his Digg account either, so he can’t show me the ropes. I’ll have to find some friends later, so on to the Personal Profile.

Your Personal Profile a place for, yes, your personal profile (name, email, website, IM address, etc.). It would be cool to have a place for links to other similar sites here- Delicious, Bloglines, etc. There is also a place on the page where your Digg stats are displayed (mine are pretty dismal since I’ve only Dugg that one story) and a place to select some display options for browsing around the Digg site (same window, new window, etc.) I made my selections and headed off to find some interesting stuff to read.

And Did I Find Good Stuff to Read?

Clicking the Home link at the top takes you back to the Digg Front Page, where the top stories appear based on a secret formula based on factors like the number of votes received and the time of day. The idea is that users pick the stories that get to the top, and that this citizen media approach will generally move faster than, and consequently scoop, old media. According to the Wall Street Journal story, Digg got the Google Pack story out hours before anybody else.

The stories I found were, as expected and as desired, heavily tech weighted and happily different from the ones I’d already seen this morning via my RSS feeds and daily reads. There were some stories about Firefox 2.0, a live rocket launch, WiFi and the NSA spying on us.

I am a big Firefox fan, so I followed that link, which had been Dugg 961 times (front page stories ranged from 71 to 969 Diggs). I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know, but I did find a source for Firefox news I didn’t know about.

All in all, it looks like a good place to mine for news and interesting content.

But Somehow it Feels a Tad Stressful

And that’s the strange part. I can’t explain it but something about the voting process feels a little stressful. Almost like a news story beauty contest. It’s a subtle feeling, and not one that will keep me away. But it’s definitely there. I wonder if it’s just me or if this is something others have felt?

Conclusions and a Digg Submission

I have added Digg to my daily reading list (yes, I know I’m probably the last person on earth to so do). I think it will be a good resource, notwithstanding the vaguely stressful feeling it gives me.

I’m going to publish this post and then submit it to Digg. Digging my own post may be a violation of some policy that will get me booted and keep my Digging History at 2 forever, but I’m going for the full immersive experience here- and so far I think it’s pretty cool.

Technorati Tags:
digg, web 2.0

Stephen Baker over at Business Week continued the “who will buy Technorati” prediction contest today by reaffirming his choice of Microsoft as the likely buyer. Mike Arrington’s choice is Yahoo, and of course mine is Google, for the reasons stated here.

The interesting thing about Stephen’s latest post is that it reminds us that the price for Technorati has probably gone up now that Technorati has seemingly overcome its scaling problems and made its service faster and more reliable. Technorati is run by some smart folks and I imagine they turned down some overtures in 2005 that would have netted a good, but not astronomical price.

That is starting to look like a brilliant move. Now that Yahoo has snapped up Delicious and Flickr, Microsoft and Google have to either pay through the nose (perhaps in a secret bidding war with each other) or let Yahoo take a commanding and perhaps overwhelming lead in the Web 2.0 race. A hobson’s choice for them but a dream come true for Technorati.

My choice remains Google, but the Rupert Mountjoy fan in me thinks it would be hilarious if Technorati tried to buy Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.

Podzinger, a new service that may revolutionize the way we search for podcasts of interest, launched this week.

It uses the same voice recognition technology used by the CIA, but instead of finding bad guys, it helps find good podcasts. By turning speech into searchable text, Podzinger will allow users to perform deeper searches and view results by relevance, much the way Google does for web searches. Once you find a promising podcast, you can listen to it from the search results page or subscribe to the RSS feed.

What the big deal?

Here’s the big deal according to the Podzinger FAQ:

Most podcast search sites provide directories of podcasts by subject, category, or they search only the metadata provided by the creator of the podcast. Podzinger takes search a step further by searching the spoken words inside the podcast in order to find more specific and relevant results. The text-based search results include snippets from the audio to help you figure out if the result is relevant. You can even click on the words to listen to the audio from that point.

But what about music?

Note that the blurb above talks about “spoken words.” I will be curious to see how the search AI distinguishes between speech and the vocals in music tracks. If there’s some way to extract the spoken parts between songs, it would pick up artist names, song titles, etc. That would be truly revolutionary.

Podzinger will be ad-supported, so there’s no charge to use to service. I’ve already submitted my RanchoCasts to Podzinger and will report again once they are available via Podzinger.

Here’s some more discussion on Podzinger from:

TechCrunch
Marketing VOX
Harry Chen

I made a secret promise to myself months ago that I would not use the phrase “Web 2.0” here because it sounded too much like “pre-owned cars.” Just another fancy sounding slogan created by marketers somewhere to entice people into believing it’s something more than it really is.

But Reuters has an article today that actually brought the whole Web 2.0 thing into focus for me. Rather than try to describe it (and thereby irritate me all over again), the article uses examples. Those examples are TypePad, Flickr and Del.icio.us. The article sums up Web 2.0 this way: “hosted online, relying heavily on users’ submissions, and frequently updated and tweaked by their owners.”

Anyone who reads this site knows that I think Flickr is the greatest thing going right now. I also use Del.icio.us daily. Add in some others like Technorati, Memeorandum and all the blogs I read and it becomes pretty apparent that pretty much my entire internet experience these days is all about Web 2.0.

It also becomes clear that Web 2.0 is a close cousin of the decentralization of media content that I am so interested in. The results of the process are more important than the name of the process, so I guess I better start looking at and thinking about this Web 2.0 business.

One of the issues with Web 2.0 is that people become dependent on remotely hosted services which, because of scale and other issues, occasionally (and sometime more often than that) have outages. When I can’t make a post here or see photos or find good content to read because my blogging platform, Flickr or Technorati is down or acting up, it really bugs me. Web 2.0 moves in real time, and the reliability of these services will be one of the major testing grounds for their success. Given all of the changes that have occurred over the past year or so that lead to the Web 2.0 movement and that have spurred its incredible growth, however, we users have to accept and understand (at least for a while and to a point) that outages and hiccups will accompany the growing pains. Del.icio.us’s frequent outages since it was bought by Yahoo are annoying now, but in order to be stable and scalable later, there have to be repairs and maintenance now. That’s the order of well managed things- both on the web and in the real world.

We’ve just begun the Web 2.0 movement and I am certain there are a lot more treats in store for us. But the price for enjoying this new technology is the bumps along the way. It seems to me that’s a pretty fair price.

Since I am so in favor of the concept behind Web 2.0, I guess I have to cowboy up (as I sometimes tell my kids) and use the dreaded word.

Just don’t make me call my large, ornate cabinet an armoire.

Technorati Tags:
web 2.0, blogging

Henry Blodget posted today about Yahoo’s acquisition of del.icio.us and posed the question whether del.icio.us exploited and then abandoned its users.

First a little background and a brief rant:

1) Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service, which means it is a service that allows users like me and you to bookmark web sites and parts of web sites and add descriptive keywords, called tags, to describe the things we have bookmarked. Other users can then search for topics of interest by searching for related tags.

2) The discussion that Henry describes happened at some “industry think-tank.” I find the whole idea of think-tanks to be hugely pretentious. I’m surprised Ken Leebow wasn’t there so he could run home and post about how useless the rest of our blogs are, but I digress. Henry’s a smart guy and I enjoy his writing- even if he did participate in a think-tank.

Anyhow, the issue is that web sites like del.icio.us build a platform, rely on users to populate and expand it and then, sometimes, sell it for a fat profit. As Henry points out, that’s the same thing that happens with message boards, review and opinion sites and countless other platforms. It happens with blogs- commenting and interactivity are the best ways to increase page views, which increase value.

The theory behind del.icio.us is the same theory that drives the growth of message boards. People want to express their opinion (Henry did it and now I’m doing it) and they like to do it at a place where they can find an audience. When I developed ACCBoards.Com, it was just an bunch of code on a server. But it filled a need- the web was a smaller place back then there was no other web site where fans of all ACC schools could gather to talk about their shared passion for ACC sports. By share, of course, I mean not just to read, but also to write. Before long we were getting millions of page views a month. I didn’t sell ACCBoards.Com, but I was about to when the dot.com bust occurred (I still get that letter of intent out once in a while and weep over it).

Was I somehow taking advantage of my users? I don’t think so. It took a lot of money to pay for the servers that ran the original site, and the new features I wanted to add were going to require money and resources I didn’t have. The users’ needs would still have be met had the sale closed- maybe even met better. Yes, I would have made some money, but so do the developers of successful shopping malls, restaurants and golf courses- all of which rely on their customers to make them successful. And unlike most golf courses, you don’t have to pay to use del.icio.us.

It all boils down to service- if you provide a service to people, they will use it. If you create a sense of community, they will use it even more. If you do that and then make some money, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Sure the big dollars might be harder to come by in the future, but we thought the very same thing after the dot.com bust and there’s lots of money being made now- 5 or so years later. It’s a cyclical thing. There will always be new trends and new ideas driving those trends. In the mid-nineties, blogs (nee journals) were boring internet diaries. Now for all intents and purposes blogs are the internet. Things change and ideas are hatched. Money can be made, and lots of it on the frontiers- be in California in the 1890’s or the internet in the 1990’s.

Henry concludes, as I do, that del.icio.us did nothing wrong. Provide a good service, make a little money. That’s the way things ought to work.

Technorati Tags:
delicious, yahoo