Liveblogging Kevin Rose's talk at the Web 2.0 Summit: new Digg features for dugg sites
Kevin Rose, founder of social news site Digg, is speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit right now. Here's live coverage of the presentation.
2:13: The topic: What Digg's learned over the past two years and what happens behind the scenes. (This is where we learn it's just a monkey drinking Heineken.) Calls Rumsfeld "Rumsfield." Notes that the story about Rumsfeld stepping down hit the front page of Digg in 5 minutes after the first published announcement, Reddit in 3, Google News in 25 minutes.
Most of the users who glommed onto this story early, found it on Digg's Swarm and Stack tools.
2:17: Digg is also working on giving these tools to web publishers, giving dugg writers info about who's digging their story, what's going on. Digg's building a flash toolkit for this.
Gaming Digg
Kevin: Users are trying to game Digg — groups like Spike the Vote. But they don't know what Digg is doing behind the scenes to stop this. Digg looked at patterns, watching stories as they were being dugg. He shows graphs of diggs over time.
"We can get an idea of a healthy digging pattern over time." Are they being dugg from upcoming pages? Are they being dugg by people referred from other sites? "If a lot of diggs have no referrer, we can tell someone's trying to game Digg."
Another graph shows some stories with strange activity, which stand out from a dark pattern formed by the many similarly dugg stories. Same-source digging, high percentage of anonymous proxies — these are signs of fake diggs.
2:22: Digg is starting to create profiles. First, it shows users who are good or bad diggers. Second, it'll help Diggers socialize. "There are users that we internally call prescient submitters...they have a knack for what is cool and what will become popular." These are not the top diggers.
Kevin shows a flash module — "This is dumb so we won't launch this" — like the Digg swarm feature, but with bees buzzing toward flowers. Looks cute, but easy to see how it's basically a skimmed swarm.