Neothoughts

iBegin Toronto is a socially driven local search engine. This means that it is a search engine for local places (stores, restaurants, bars, etc.) where all of the listings are user-contributed. Users can contribute reviews and pictures of local destinations. Currently it services the Toronto area.

I’m very excited to spread the word that iBegin has decided to contribute $0.50 to charity for each review and each picture that is contributed to their site. They have chosen the Assaulted Women’s Hotline as the beneficiary of this generous move.

The donation drive lasts between August 28, 2006 (today) and October 15, 2006. So if you’re out and about in the city, snap some pictures of the local destinations in your area. Sign up, post a review and some pictures. Lets see how much money we can raise. This is a great opportunity to put our drive to contribute content towards a good cause.

More details are available here. Also read over the philosophy of iBegin as well.

Courtesy iBegin Blog

Every day, more content producers are recognizing the impact that socially edited news sites have on the internet’s consumption of news and they want in on the fun. As a result, one of the questions I am asked most frequently about social news sites is “how can I get my article onto the front page?”

Good Content

It starts with good content. Without that you will get nowhere. People will tell you that you can rally enough people to vote your content to the front-page on these sites, but if it isn’t grade-A quality then it will either be ignored or get knocked off the front page fast enough to make your head spin.

Know The Audience

One audience’s quality content is another’s Garfield The Movie. Don’t expect to be successful with brilliantly written political op-eds on a social news site that is ga-ga about basket-weaving. The best way to familiarize yourself with the community of one of these sites is to sign up, participate in discussions and socialize with users.

Hint: the first person to write an article titled “Top 10 Videos of the Wii Controller Being Used to Interface With Ubuntu (Article Enhanced in Firefox)” will be crowned the King of Digg.

Educate Your Audience

Make sure your website’s audience is down with social bookmarking. They will be the most willing to support you on social news sites. Make use of social bookmarking sites’ content integration tools. Digg provides tools to easily integrate a submission button and a “digg it??? button into your content. Netscape has similar tools as well. Integrate these tools into your content. Write an article that gives your users an overview of what these new-fangled buttons they are seeing on your content are and how fun it is to participate.

Submitting Your Own Content

I’m not going to absolutely forbid anyone from submitting their own content to social news sites. If you’ve got great stuff, there isn’t a reason why you shouldn’t submit it (especially if you’re a brand new source of information on the internet and are still trying to get exposure). Almost all of the big social news sites encourage people to submit their own things.

That being said, I would advise you to avoid it if at all possible. There is a stigma on self-promotion on many of these sites that makes it much more desirable to have other people submit your content for you. Fortunately, if you have good content and you educate your audience in the art of social bookmarking, you will likely have many people who are eager to contribute links to your content for you.

Socialize

They don’t call them socially driven content sites for nothing. Engage in conversations that arise from your articles and related topics. Befriend people who submit your articles and related ones. Let them know you appreciate them submitting your content. Make sure people on your website know your username on social bookmarking sites.

Spot Your Content

Keep tabs on your content’s adventures in social bookmarking. Most of the major sites provide ways to search for content by URL. Once someone has submitted something of yours to Digg, you can add the “digg it” button to your content referring back to the submission. The sooner you add that button after a submission has been made, the better, because submissions on Digg only have a 24-hour shelf life before they are removed from the queue. This lets people vote on your article while they are on your site.

This morning, The Washington Post ran an article about the recent buzz around social bookmarking and Netscape’s move to pay people to do it. Many of my new colleagues at Netscape, as well as myself, were interviewed for the article. The article turned out great as an overview of the current landscape of professional bookmarking.

It doesn’t draw any conclusions, and I think rightly so. It is still too early to determine if “professional social bookmarker” is going to be a mainstay role on the internet. We have not yet heard from Netscape if they are seeing a return on their investment.

Sara points out that we neither report nor write the news. I just wanted to add to that that our roles might be more comparable to an editor or publisher. We decide what is fit to publish. Other users come along and validate that decision by voting on our submissions. Dozens of content producers have approached me asking “I want to write this story. Is it front-page material?” or asking for advice on how to make a story front-page material.

Another thing that this article brings to light is that we need to be very clear about the difference between “users” and “contributors”. It is easy to use these words interchangeably when referring to socially driven news sites, but they are very different things. Deciding to pay people to contribute to your website is very different from deciding to pay people to use it.

Netscape has a very handy JavaScript widget for publishers to put in their content. The widget checks if your content has been submitted to Netscape. If it hasn’t been submitted, a submit button is placed on your page as shown below:

If it has already been submitted, it displays the number of votes and comments, with a button that lets your users vote up the story without even leaving your page. Shown below:

I’ve created a WordPress plugin which makes it very easy for anyone running a WordPress blog to integrate this functionality. Just follow these instructions and the buttons will be placed on all of your posts automatically:1. Download it here.2. Unzip and place netscape-widget.php in your \wp-content\plugins directory.

3. Activate the plugin in the Plugin Manager in your WordPress Dashboard.

4. Place the following php script in your theme anywhere within the Single Post file: <?php nw_scapeThis(); ?>

When you’re done, your content will have a direct pipeline into Netscape just like the one below.

UPDATE: If you would like to put this widget on one of your pages but you do not have a WordPress blog, you still can. To put it on any page, just add the following script tag:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript” xsrc=”http://www.netscape.com/widgets/med_vote_if/
http://YOURWEBSITE.com”></script>

Make sure the src attribute doesn’t have the line-break in it and replace http://YOURWEBSITE.com with the URL of your page you are putting it on.

Alex Weidmann presents proof that Digg is replacing the URLs of duplicate stories with those of original stories. He also asks the question: what else are moderators doing to our submissions without us knowing?

According to some users, submissions are having their categories changed without notice. While speaking with a user by the name of Aidenag, he told me that he has seen 2 of his submissions change topics. This story switched from Political Opinion to People Video. This story switched from World News to Other Sports.

Aidenag is not alone. I spoke with another user, aaaz, who told me that this story was moved from Design to Environment after it had been promoted to the front page. He suggested that it may have been because he submitted it shortly after v3 was launched in June and perhaps they were trying to fill out the new categories.

These kinds of practices are quite regular on Netscape, since they have Anchors who are there to ensure the quality of the news and add value to it with meta-journalism. However, I get the impression that Digg users would not appreciate having their submissions changed without warning. If you change the category of a story, it changes who will see it since users can selectively enable/disable them. Digg users keep this in mind while submitting stories.

If Digg intends to moderate the submissions on their site, they would be much better off doing it overtly, with everyone well aware of it. Digg should tell us all of the moderation-related things they do behind the scenes and make sure everyone understands that it is in order to keep the quality of the content as high as possible.

PiggNation is a weekly video podcast which discusses the most popular stories of Digg’s World News & Politics section. It stars Steven Christe and Dan Rummel, a couple of guys who get drunk and wax philosophical about the hottest stories, with laptops in hand.

Sound familiar? It should. It was inspired by Diggnation, the weekly video podcast hosted by Digg founder Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.

I just caught the first two episodes of PiggNation and these guys are doing a great job. And I’m not just saying that because they gave BloodJunkie a shout-out in each episode. I like their approach and they seem fairly non-partisan. They certainly appear to not be pushing any agenda. Just an appreciation of news & politics.

I really like what they did at the end of the second episode. They highlighted a story that made it to the front page of Digg about Donald Rumsfeld declining to testify on the Iraq war because he was too busy. They went on to highlight a story that was submitted just a couple of hours after that which explained that Rumsfeld had changed his mind and decided to testify. The second story didn’t make the front page of Digg but it was important nonetheless. It was a great move on their part to tie up that loose end.

I’m really excited to see another Digg-fueled video podcast and I hope that more people start podcasts for other categories as well. This is how socially driven media takes over the world.

Thanks to supernova17 for the heads up on these guys.

People have been asking me a lot of questions about etiquette while social bookmarking. I thought I would play Miss Manners and share the code of conduct which I apply to myself while social bookmarking. I think this contributed to me becoming a top-ranked digger. These are dos and don’ts which you wont find in your social bookmarking site’s Terms of Use.

Do: Follow the Golden Rule

Treat other people as you wish to be treated. This is good advice in all aspects of life and social bookmarking is no exception. This mostly applies to comments. For instance, if you notice you are commenting on something submitted by someone who registered within the last couple of days, it would be nice to add a welcome message for them and some words of encouragement.

Don’t: Dupe

Don’t dupe. Ever. Submitting a duplicate of a story that is already in the queue splits the votes between the stories. This results in the story taking longer to get promoted which, in turn, degrades the efficiency of the system’s ability to aggregate up-to-the-minute news. Don’t submit a duplicate of a story that has already been removed from the queue because you think it is important enough to have another shot. Duping a story that has been removed from the queue because of its age or other reasons undermines the decisions or non-decisions of your community. No story is important enough to undermine your community. There will always be another hot story around the corner.

Do: Point Out Dupes

The sooner duplicate stories are pointed out, the sooner they can be prevented from hindering the original’s chances at being promoted to the front page. If you notice a duplicate submission, point it out and provide a link to the original submission.

Don’t: “Reported as Lame”

Commenting that you reported a story makes about as much sense as commenting that you voted for it. Other users do not need to know that you reported a story. If they want to know that stories are being reported, they can watch digg spy. The only people who need to know you reported a story are the site administrators (and the site itself which I am told is not actually a person).

Do: Thank Dupe-Spotters

Be appreciative of people who point out a duplicate story that you submitted. They have the best interest of the community, the system and the story in mind. Own up to your mistake by apologizing. This lets the community know that you also have its best interest in mind. Vote for the original, cut your losses and submit a new story.

Don’t: Comment Without R’ing TFA

You don’t want to look like you aren’t familiar with the subject you are commenting on, do you? You should always read the article you are commenting on before giving your 2 cents.

Do: Search Before Submitting

Search by keyword for to see if a story you would like to submit already exists on the site. If the story already exists, vote for the original. Even if searching for it means you will miss out on submitting a breaking story, it is worth it to preserve a high front page ratio and to prevent you from getting a reputation as a rampant dupe-submitter.

Don’t: Sign Comments

There is a reason why socially driven news sites do not provide a mechanism for automatically adding a signature to your comments. They want to keep the discussion relevant to the submission without clutter. Don’t add unrelated links into your comments. Don’t even sign them with your name. This is known as “comment-spam”.

Do: Report Bugs

Site administrators are extremely appreciative of people who report bugs or functional anomalies. Lucky for them, they don’t need testers because they have thousands of people constantly testing their applications.

Don’t: Question the Algorithm

Commenting on how unusual it is that something was promoted to the front page with only XX votes does not belong in a submission’s comment thread. If you suspect something has gone awry with the site’s promotion algorithm, you should contact the site’s support staff. In fact, don’t speculate on the promotion on algorithm at all.

Do: Report Abusive Users

Socially driven sites are always concerned with maintaining a positive social environment for their users. If you notice someone who is being abusive to other users, you should notify the site’s support staff so that they can deal with it appropriately.

Don’t: Spin

Don’t take a perfectly good story and put a title and description on it that spin it to support an agenda you have. Being creative or funny with titles and descriptions is awesome, but try to stay true to the subject of the story. Save the spin for the discussion thread.

Do: Socialize

There is a reason they call it “social” bookmarking. Add people with similar voting and submitting patterns to your friends list. Connect with these people via email and IM.

All of these came from experience. I’ve been guilty of doing all the above don’ts and had to figure out the dos.

Feel free to add your own dos and don’ts in the comments.

The political categories of socially driven news sites are unlike any others. Submitters are treated differently than they are in other categories. Stories and commenters are also treated differently. Users are banding together to get stories promoted which push agendas. These factors and others are affecting how well social bookmarking sites can report political stories.

Digg added a section for political news in June as part of their v3 upgrade. This was an opportunity for social bookmarkers to cut through the BS of mainstream political news and share stories with each other that they may not have otherwise seen, just as Digg excels at doing for technology news.

Along with this new opportunity came new users, with new motivations for social bookmarking and new attitudes towards other users. Most submitters are assumed to endorse the political leanings of whatever they submit. It is assumed that their submissions are part of their “agendas”. How fascinating! I didn’t know I had an agenda until I started participating in Digg’s politics topic. If you are planning to contribute political news to a social bookmarking site, be prepared to be flamed by someone who does not agree with whichever way your submission leans.

Users are also allegedly organizing themselves in groups that support articles with specific agendas. This was bound to happen as new demographics realize what a huge force social bookmarking is for getting noticed on the internet. Political bloggers are taking notice as well, and encouraging their readers to support their work through social bookmarking. The community is having mixed reactions to these behaviours. New users are always welcome. New content is also always welcome. None of the two above behaviours are against the terms of use on any social bookmarking site, yet many users consider them ways of gaming the system.

At the time of writing this, 10 of the last 30 stories promoted to the front page of Digg from the Political News topic have been marked as possibly inaccurate by the community. 11 of the last 30 stories promoted from the Political Opinion topic have been marked likewise. What does this mean? If one were to take this at face value, one would think that either Digg is an exceptionally bad source of political stories, with more than 33% of them being inaccurate, or the burying feature on Digg is being grossly abused.

Reading through the comments on these submissions reveals that it is the latter. It is obvious that users are using the bury feature irresponsibly. This results in the news appearing skewed in a very different way than it is skewed by mainstream media. This is socially skewed news, shaped to look how the community wants it to look. This is a trait that Netscape does not share, as none of the last 100 political stories on the front page of Netscape have been marked as inaccurate. Stories should always be voted on and buried based on their merits.

The social skew of a social bookmarking site reflects on the site as a whole. I recently noticed Fabienne, an Anchor at Netscape, remark on how they get complaints from people depending on the political leanings of stories on the front page of their site.

All this being said, I believe that political sections on social bookmarking sites are doing very well. They have helped me discover countless stories that I would not have otherwise. But just like politics in real life, it is not without its faults. Perhaps social bookmarking sites as we know them are not best suited to political news. I would welcome any new ideas for socially driven web solutions geared towards political news. But also just like politics in real life, no matter the solution, you will not be able to please everyone.

Digg users are asserting that AOL, specifically Weblogs Inc., is spamming Digg. And the community is none too pleased. The term “spamming” in this instance refers to a couple of dozen users that are systematically digging each other’s content. Is this really spam?

Yes

Let’s assume that it is, in fact, spam. This would mean that we all agree that it is not acceptable for a group of different human users to repeatedly digg the same stories in unison. How can we identify this behaviour? It seems to me that it would be hard to differentiate this from other “normal” digging of friends’ submissions. In fact it appears identical to me.

But let’s further assume that we have a way to definitively identify these group-spammers. How can we solve it?

• One option would be to devalue the diggs of a story that came from a friend of the submitter. Unfortunately, doing this would take focus off of the quality of the submitted content, and add focus to the submitter. If Mr. Friendly Pants came along and befriended the top 30,000 users of Digg, then anything he submitted would be screwed out of a chance at the front page.

• Another solution might be to ban all Weblogs Inc. content on Digg. But the problem with that is that in this situation, the content isn’t being labeled spam, but the submitter and supporting diggers are being labeled “spammers”. That’s a unique situation right there.

• That brings us to a solution of simply banning the users who are found to be group-spamming. I would find this acceptable if we were able to unquestionably identify these people as group-spammers AND if it were in Digg’s Terms of Use, which it is not.

• Perhaps the digg community could set up an anti-group-spammer ring of users who would systematically bury the stories of people who have been identified as group-spammers. This seems like the most justifiable solution to me, but unfortunately, like the first solution, this would take the focus off of the content and put it onto the users. Good content might very well end up slipping through the cracks.

And even if those solutions are put in place, there are ways around them. Imagine a revolving-door group-spamming system that coordinates a large group of people to randomly digg articles as they were submitted. Diggers could be notified by email when they are requested to digg something, and if they don’t digg it within an hour, someone else in the list is emailed. It would work like a charm and be incredibly hard to detect.

Imagine also setting up a 3rd party digg friend network to complement the above work-around. It would be extremely easy to do with a Jabber-based IM client and the RSS feeds located in each of our profiles. This would be an effective work-around to a situation where Digg devalues the diggs of friends of submitters.

No

Now let’s assume that this does not qualify as spam. Personally, I think it is entirely reasonable to ask a friend to digg something that you submit. Obviously Digg feels the same way because they provide all the tools you need to lobby for diggs from right within your content. If you ask your friends for diggs, that doesn’t mean they have to digg your submission. No one has a bunch of child labourers holed up in a shanty being forced to digg things against their will. Digg has always been spectacular at filtering out bad content.

…

I do not believe there is anything Digg can do to put a stop to this without degrading the quality of their content or the quality of its community. I doubt they even regard it as a problem. The important thing is: you will never see spam content on the front page of Digg. What is happening here is not spam. This is people contributing and participating democratically. Come on, guys; it is going to take more than a couple of dozen mere mortals to pull the wool over the eyes of the Digg community.

I’ve been asked how I handle URLs on sites like Digg and Netscape. The URLs you choose to submit actually make quite a difference. Their uniqueness plays a big factor in getting promoted to the front page.

The more unique a URL is to a story, the less likely duplicates of that story will be submitted. Duplicates (aka dupes) are the bane of many people’s existance in social bookmarking. They split votes for a story between multiple submissions, thereby degrading the community’s efficiency of bringing that story to the masses. In other words, they slow a story down from reaching the front page or sometimes cause it to miss its window of promotion opportunity altogether.

Query Strings

Have you ever noticed that stories on sites like BusinessWeek, CNet and Wired have multiple URLs for the same story? Take this story on Wired for example:

This is the URL for this story that you will get from Wired’s RSS feed:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71595-0.html?tw=rss.index

…and this is the one you will find by going to Wired’s website:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71595-0.html?tw=wn_index_2

Both lead to the same exact page. The only difference is what is at the end of the URL. Everything from the question-mark to the end is what is called a query string. Many sites use these for different purposes which I will not go into. News sites often use these to collect information about where you found their article. If you visit the first link above, it tells Wired that you clicked the link in their RSS feed. If you visit the second link, it tells them that you found it from their website.

Often you can actually strip the query string off of the URL altogether and still go to the exact same page, which is a handy way to shorten a URL you think is too long:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71595-0.html

So when it comes to submitting stories like this, the problem is Netscape and Digg recognize all 3 of the above URLs as different stories. Which one do you choose? With popular sites like Wired, it is all but guaranteed that all the different versions of a popular story’s URL will be submitted (duped), so you have to determine which URL will be the most popular one that people try to submit, so that yours is the one that pops up as the original when they try to submit a dupe.

Determining which URL will be more unique for a story depends on the site. If the site has a “Digg This” button on their articles, then always err towards using that. If not, you have to consider whether more people will access the article through the RSS feed or trough the website.

I would encourage all content producers that want to be successful on social bookmarking sites to strive for unique URLs for all your content.

Wire Stories

Stories from Reuters or the AP are entirely another hassle where URLs are concerned. It is impossible to have a unique URL for these stories because so many reporting services pick them up (Yahoo! News, CNN, Newsvine, Topix, etc.). For stories like these you have to rely on others to search before submitting in order to prevent dupes. Whether or not it is a wire story you are trying to submit, I would encourage all social bookmarkers to make it a habit to search before submitting.

The Future

I hope that in the future this is made to be less of a concern when submitting stories. Let’s face it: no one wants to worry about URLs when social bookmarking and having to do so would be a barrier to entry for less technically savvy people. I would love it if these sites would provide more powerful tools for both preventing dupes and dealing with them after they have been discovered. I’ll write more about that another time though.