What’s the most obvious sign that a traditional news brand is merely reproducing online what they do in print, instead of publishing in a way that makes sense for the web? They way news is organized on the homepage.

Let’s compare three news site homepages — TechCrunch, Digg, and New York Times.

Digg is a great experiment in web “democracy” — a site where ANYONE can submit links to content and vote on links to their favorite content. The positive outcome of the Digg experiment has been demonstrating the power of “networked human intelligence” to filter the vast sea of content on the web and allocate attention […]

So Clinton and McCain won in New Hampshire. All the polls got it wrong. Great upset story. This morning, I wanted to read about how it happened, but I only had time to read one article before getting to work.

This presented an interesting question. How should I figure out who’s got the best coverage of […]

I’ve only had a post reach Digg’s homepage once, back in 2006, and I see no great loss if it never happens again. Why would I forgo those thousands of visits? Because Publishing 2.0, like most niche blogs, is essentially a trade publication (to use traditional media labels), and just as my content has little […]

Social media marketing, i.e. promoting content through social media sites like Digg has become a cottage industry. Digg and other “audience as editor” sites have fought tooth and nail against gaming, trying to keep marketing content from receiving the same homepage attention as “editorial content,” i.e. content voted up by the community without marketer influence. […]

The Digg user revolt (see here if you haven’t heard the story) demonstrates the real problem with Digg — anonymous users are not accountable as individuals, so they have no qualms about breaking the law or forcing a company to break the law. This problem is above and beyond the inherent problem of Digg’s user […]

If Digg were truly a democratic system, it wouldn’t matter who Dugg your story, just so long as it got into the system — then democracy would work its magic. But the fact is that it does matter who Diggs you. I just noticed that my last post was Dugg, but then I saw it […]

There’s a great, old-fashioned investigative journalism piece on Wired about gaming Digg, which details a successful effort to buy a fake story onto the homepage. Here’s what jumped out at me:
Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There’s a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more […]

I was just on Digg, looking at the top ten list on the homepage, and it suddenly struck me that Digg is the apotheosis of niche media — of the niche, by the niche, and for the niche. Never has another media company so perfectly captured the interests and ethos of one defined group of […]

Digg is undertaking a grand experiment in flattening out the natural long tail curve that seems to manifest in every open participation web platform. Kevin Rose announced that Digg will no longer display the top diggers list, which has been the focal point of Digg’s de facto hierarchical system and the driver of much […]

There’s a thread on Techmeme about a new Digg payola scandal — posts at Pronet Advertising and The Blog Herald reproduce the following email (I’m about to be complicit in the free advertising scam):
Hello,

I need a favor. I run a website bringpopcorn.com.

Would you get my website to the Digg first page, and if successful I’ll […]

We all bow down to the gods of traffic, but the reality is that not all traffic is created equal. Perhaps if you’re selling junk page views to an ad network for rock-bottom prices, it’s all the same, but for most pages on most “quality” content sites, some kinds of traffic are definitely better than […]

Findory, a personalized news service created by Greg Linden, who worked on Amazon’s groundbreaking personalization engine, will be put on autopilot as Greg steps away from the effort. Om Malik comments:

Despite being drop dead simple, Findory never realized its true potential as an information discovery engine. It has all the makings of being a personal […]

According to SEO Todd Mailcoat, getting three stories to the homepage of Digg puts you in the top 1% of Digg users, and it takes “months” to build up a what Todd calls a “reputable” Digg account. Those statistics struck me as stunning, so I decided to dig into Digg’s top user data (which loads […]

In response to PayPerPost’s continuing lack of disclosure policy, I wrote, “if you can’t tell whether something is an ad, that’s deception.” It appears that the Federal Trade Commission agrees (via The Washington Post).

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their […]

As Digg increasingly confronts the spectre of spam and gaming of the system (Tony Hung has the latest round), Kevin Rose and Co. have been forced to add increasing complexity to the Digg algorithm, to the point where the value of a Digg on Digg has become so opaque as to be rendered utterly meaningless. […]

At first, Google was just a search engine, but once it reached sufficient scale to be a meaningful driver of traffic, it became a hardcore marketplace for traffic — both one of its own (wildly successful) creation, in the form of AdWords, and one of the market’s creation, in the form of spam. Now that […]

As participatory media goes mainstream, media companies are discovering that it’s a lot easier to hop on the ideological bandwagon of participation than it is to actually do participatory media well.

Along with the upside of “crowdsourcing” its news gathering, Gannet also discovered the pitfalls of participatory news:

The [Cincinnati Enquirer] recently asked the crowd to weigh […]

In the continuing (and, I predict, growing) audience measurement saga, Fred Wilson chastises Mike Arrington for calling comScore’s audience metrics “flaky” vis-a-vis Digg’s audience:

My guess is that Digg has something like 5mm monthly unique visitors worldwide. Not 20mm. The difference probably results from cookie counting, multiple browsers, and a few other factors.

Perhaps a better question […]

What’s more amusing? Scoble and New Media folks discover “engagement,” a term that the old advertising establishment has been “engaged” with for quite some time. Or, that hot and utterly hip video blogging has been caught up in a he said, he said spat over audience measurement. Welcome to media! These guys sound like a […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about media brands and whether they still matter in the new media landscape. The more I think about, the more it seems that brands are the only thing that still matters in media. What’s changed is not the importance or the role of media brands, but rather what defines a […]

Jason Calacanis of Netscape and Kevin Rose of Digg are out again debating who will win the batter over power users who drive the majority of the value on “community”-driven news sites like Digg and Netscape. Ken says user will are motivated by “free, democratic social” ideals. Jason says users deserve to get a piece […]

I’ve been following an interesting trend of power grabs by Web 2.0 companies, from MySpace to YouTube to Google — Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about the “user,” but when it comes to profit making the user is getting shut out:

MySpace

Musicians don’t get paid for music played on MySpace (via Umair):
The most popular […]

It has been well documented that Netscape users don’t like the new Digg-like Netscape. Jason Calacanis’ solution — hire away Digg’s power users, who drive 90% of Digg’s value. But even if these power users are for sale (an interesting question), it still wouldn’t help Netscape woo back its original user base of average people. […]

Google is taking a lot of flack lately because it’s launched tons of apps but none has had even a fraction of the success of Google search. BusinessWeek gave Google a big kick in the head, as did Scoble, and many others.

So why hasn’t Google launched anything as successful as the original search? Because it’s […]

In a review of Digg v3, TechCrunch declares that Digg is challenging The New York Times online in terms of page views. As evidence, Mike references an Alexaholic graph. Let’s look at the actual numbers.

According to TechCrunch, Digg has 800,000 daily unique visitors and 9 million page daily views. Here are the NYTimes.com […]

The launch of AOL/Netscape’s multi-channel Digg clone/killer came in the same week as news of new verticals in the soon-to-be-launched version 3 of Digg. As with vertical search, both Digg and its imitators see an opportunity to carve up the community-driven news category.

The same is true of the related memetracker category, with Gabe Rivera […]

On the face of it, the news that AOL/Netscape is launching a Digg killer suggests that if Digg, Reddit, and other imitators had a chance to sell, they should have taken it. It also suggests that Web 2.0 start-ups may be vulnerable to the goliath media companies with huge reach swooping in to eat their […]

Here’s more evidence that Digg is not the product of “collective intelligence” but rather a tightly controlled site run by a handful of people.

Yesterday, I wrote about LostCherry, a would-be MySpace killer. Someone posted the story to Digg, and it began rapidly garnering “diggs” and a slew of comments from enthusiastic LostCherry users.

Apparently, the Digg […]

So Digg has been accused of gaming its own system, censorship, and other “undemocratic” behavior — perhaps more evidence that 2.0 isn’t as 2.0 as the hype machines wants you to think it is.

Kevin Rose’s response is positively Bushian in his refusal to admit any possible wrongdoing.

But I was blown away by Jason Calacanis’ […]

Kudos to Digg CEO Jay Adelson for having a fairly credible perspective on the alleged stock manipulation via stories on Digg (re: Google’s rumored purchase of Sun) that has been causing such a dust-up:

When you’re empowering the mass, you have to be careful about quality control. It would be unfair to label all of Web […]

Media is about conversation and participation. Consumers can create their own media. Value is being created at the edge. You’ve heard all the New Media maxims.

The problem, as many people have stated many times, is that the more everyone participates in content creation and content interaction, the harder it is to navigate the sea of […]

Tom Foremski answers “yes” to Dave Winer’s question, “is the publishing industry the new technology industry?” I think that is like saying the printing press industry is the old publishing industry. Web 2.0 applications, like the printing press, enable publishing — but they don’t define publishing. (A distinction that Tom makes.) And the current crop […]

I’ve made the point many times that the bloggerati and Web 2.0 fan club are complete outliers when it comes to media consumption habits. To illustrate this point, I conducted a little informal survey, taking aim at the latest hype over News 2.0. The survey was partly inspired by Om Malik’s quip that “News 2.0 […]

Who decides what’s worthy of your attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?

(UPDATE: Oy vey, this post is NOT about getting links, although it’s completely my fault that it’s been misread that way. […]

There may or may not be a Web 2.0 crash coming, as Steve Rubel has predicted, but there’s certainly blood in the water, with Yahoo’s earnings miss, Gather.com’s bad reviews, the demise of SearchFox, and the gathering buzz about an impending crash. Steve thinks a key factor is that “online advertising isn’t growing as […]

Instead of fearing and/or chasing after New Media, perhaps Old Media should seize the opportunity to organize the chaos that still defines the New Media universe.

Drawing on my complaint about the overabundance of media, Lloyd Shepherd took the thinking a quantum leap forward in his post, Kicking against overabundance?:

Take podcasting. I find it acutely difficult […]

Many open web advocates would hold up Slashdot as an archetype of new media democracy. Don’t let those authoritarian old media editors decide what’s important — let the people decide.

Well, it turns out “the people” are really just a small cabal of dedicated (fanatical) users, with names like Zonk, CowboyNeal, and CmdrTaco who decide […]