Neothoughts

Apparently Stephen Colbert is a Netscape reader. He closed last night’s show by commenting on a story he found on Netscape about a Chinese secret society challenging the Illuminati.

Update: Jeff Hoard has more details. Netscape has a discussion about this under way.

What happened on Digg yesterday did not have to happen. It was the wisdom of the crowd spiraling downward into a perfect storm of mob rule. The two main factors that contributed to the strength of said storm are the Digg community’s disdain for DRM and the general unawareness of the fact that Digg has moderators.

To reiterate: Digg has moderators. “Always has, always will” according to a comment by Kevin Rose in a Digg submission in November of last year. Ironically, the topic of that Digg submission was the oft-overlooked fact that Digg has moderators and the submission was democratically marked as inaccurate by the community.

Of course you wouldn’t know Digg has moderators behind the scenes by reading their blog. You also wouldn’t know it by reading their About page, as no employees listed there are described as having moderator duties. And you certainly wouldn’t know it by reading the deluge of press that tows Digg’s party line, saying that the users have complete editorial control over the site. Even Kevin Rose has been inconsistent about this message, at one time writing on his personal blog that:

users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations. All users on these sites are treated equally, there aren’t anchors, navigators, explorers, opera-ers, or editors.

He has since deleted the post that that excerpt came from. The text of that post can be found here.

Digg’s moderators are not unlike moderators at other sites. They “ban spammers, remove illegal content, and keep an eye on things” according to Kevin’s earlier comment. In other words, they enforce Digg’s terms of use. I totally respect Digg’s need to do this, and expect them to. However, the secretive manner in which they choose to enforce their terms of use rides roughshod over the democratic/freedom of speech/socially driven image that they work so hard to maintain.

So with PR buzz as strong as Digg’s and with a message of user-controlled content and free and open exchange of ideas, what kind of users do you think that would attract? Do you think it would attract proponents of DRM technology? Not exactly. The average Digg user’s opinion of DRM ranges between “hate” and “Murder Death Kill”.

It is therefore no surprise that some of the hottest topics on Digg in the last year have been related to DRM and intellectual property rights. When RIAA stumbles, or when the Pirate Bay triumphs, or when any DRM technology is foiled, it is a major story on Digg. The HD-DVD story was no exception. Indeed, before Digg killed the story the second time it was submitted, it was racing to become the highest ranked story of the last 365 days, with over 15,000 votes, rivaling Digg’s own version 3 launch announcement.

Digg’s decision to remove a story as popular as that - with no explanation until hours later - combined with the lack of understanding that Digg has moderators caused many to cry “censorship”. And I can’t really blame them. After Jay Adelson posted an explanation to Digg’s blog, many users felt alienated and that Digg had caved to the big bad DRM machine. It didn’t help when it was pointed out that Diggnation has been sponsored by The HD-DVD Promotion Group.

Judging by the differences between their two blog posts yesterday, I think Digg will learn from this episode. Obviously they can’t control their users’ interest in such hot-button topics as intellectual property rights. What they can control is their moderation methods. I hope one of the things they learn is that you can not moderate a social site in secret. Tell us who the moderators are. Detail the awesome job they are doing. Tell us how much spam and illegal content they neutralize in a given month. Make it clear how integral they are to maintaining Digg’s high level of quality. You don’t have to have them in a spotlight, just don’t keep them hidden in a closet.

PyDigg is a Python toolkit for the Digg API. It provides an object-oriented interface to all of the available endpoints of the API. It is offered under the MIT License.

Download it here: (tar.gz | zip)

Over the years, I’ve used Python for various purposes. I’ve always found it to be a great language for just about anything, from a batch file alternative to web applications to scripting a real-time 3D application. It was therefore my pleasure to write a Python toolkit for the recently released Digg API.

Full documentation is coming soon, so in the meantime here are some guidelines for using this toolkit. I’m assuming that if you read past this point, you’re familiar with the Python programming language.

The toolkit is contained in one module (’digg.py’), made up of one class (’Digg’) with several nested classes. It depends on the standard Python libraries ‘urllib’ and ‘xml.dom’.

You will only ever have to instance the root class, ‘Digg’. From there it’s a matter of using that class instance’s methods to retrieve instances of nested classes such as ‘Story’, ‘User’, ‘Comment’, etc. The ‘Digg’ class contains all methods necessary to access data. Each nested class, such as ‘Story’, contains convenience methods that redirect back to the methods in “Digg”.

The following example outputs the titles of the latest stories submitted to Digg:

from digg import *
d = Digg(APPKEY) #insert your own application key string
stories = d.getStories()
for story in stories:
print story.title

In the above example, the Digg.getStories() method returns an instance of the ‘Stories’ container class, which contains n number of ‘Story’ instances. All response data from the Digg API is accessible by class properties. For instance, the ‘User’ class has the following properties: name, icon, registered, profileviews. I tried to align my naming conventions with those of the Digg API wherever possible.

Please send me links to anything you use this for. Also, if you’re interested in contributing to the PyDigg toolkit, feel free to contact me or join the Google Code Project.

Happy Programming!

The Smart Digg Button extension for Firefox places a button in your status bar. It uses the newly released Digg API to determine if the web page you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg.

If the page you are viewing has been submitted to Digg, it displays the current number of Diggs the page has. Pressing the button takes you to the submission.

If the page you are viewing has not been submitted, pressing it takes you to Digg’s submission form where you can submit the page to Digg.

Compatibility: Firefox version 1.5 - 2.0.0.*

Install Extension Here

Note: When installing, be sure to click “Edit Options…” if it pops up to allow neothoughts.com to install add-ons for Firefox.

Add another one to the pile. MySpace is the latest of the big players to adopt the socially driven model for news delivery. Being one of the top 10 most visited sites on the web, its natural to expect a lot from such an offering. It also begs the question, with a user count that is an order of magnitude higher than all other social news sites, can MySpace News be more relevant?

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Digg user MrBabyMan created this 2-minute comedic documentary (documomedy?) to commemorate Digg’s recent milestone of passing the 1 million user mark. Digg on!

Here’s a list of ideas I’ve had over the past year or so while using social news sites. Most of them are ideas that I think would improve sites like Digg, Netscape and Reddit in one way or another. Admittedly, one or two of them would just be interesting to see implemented on an experimental level. Either way, feel free to rip each and every one to bits.

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Have you ever tried to participate on one of the big social news sites and found that you just didn’t fit in? Perhaps the problem is the level of conversation. Perhaps it is the community’s main interests. Did you know there are a world of alternatives out there which cater to niche interests, each with its own unique community.

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It takes a certain type of personality to climb the ranks on sites such as Digg. Here are some traits that are common among the most active social newsies.

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Over the past month a slew of big players have unveiled socially driven applications that all seem to have one thing in common: Digg. Here’s a rundown of new sites that have raised some eyebrows over the last month.

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