social media

social media — 6 Comments
5
Mar 07

MyUSATODAYSpace.com?

USA TODAY relaunched with social news features. Will it usher in a new era of traditional media and become a serious threat to services like NewsVine or even Digg?

Although I think it’s a bold move and a step in the right direction, I sense that the impact of USA TODAY incorporating social features into its service will have less of an impact than many think.

On the surface it looks like they simply hacked in a white label solution from Pluck. This is rarely a great way to jump start a real community. Also, the front page is now a collection of links and many people are commenting on the features page that it makes it hard for them to find real news quickly (many are threatening to jump ship to make another news site their home page).

pluck_thumb.png

usatoday_thumb.png

Pluck: Leaders in Social Media

Launching social features into a large readership

All the social media sites that are successful in their own right grew up with their communities. Digg and Reddit launched silently and built up their community one person at a time. This allowed them to gradually improve their service as more and more users came on board and provided feedback. The current product is as much a creation of its users as much as the companies that operate the service.

UT’s relaunch is more similar to the reinvention of Netscape’s in that they’re essentially targeting a large existing audience.

How much control are you willing to give the community?

Avatars and the ability to keep track of your activities or finding more personalized news is definitely a nice feature. However, how much more control are they willing to give to their community? What are the incentives to join the community for people not already a part of the current readership?

If joining the community gave me the power to influence what hits the front page of USA TODAY and how prominently it features in whatever small way, that would be a very powerful incentive to me. Another would be how good the personalization is.

If the only reason to incorporate more social features is to lock in the current USA TODAY readership as an army of loyal commenters then that might have some limited success in building loyalty but might not drive new growth. It could even backfire and alienate the readership if not thought through properly.

How fast the pace of change?

Unleashing a community on the readership is only the first step. How much feedback are they willing to take and incorporate? Like all large media properties even if the main people in charge of the project are in tune with the community, it might not be easy to push those changes. This relaunch like any web service is only the first step and the goal is still not in sight. What the company thinks a community wants and what the community wants are two different things. Factor in the wisdom that consumers don’t really know exactly want they want and you have a very tricky change process at hand.

Just look at the pages upon pages of comments(a lot of it negative) on the features announcement and you’ll get an idea of the challenges ahead.

I’m sure USA TODAY wont be the last and someone will eventually succeed in really providing a seamless experience. However, if done wrong, it can only alienate the existing readership and cause more harm than good. You need to have the commitment to community and speed for change.

USATODAY relaunched its website yesterday with a parade of new features that will add a significant social layer to the site that wasn’t there before. The website is no longer a simple hose spouting news at readers. It has become a full on social network, integrating user generated content in intelligent and interesting ways.

Bravo To USATODAY

Quick guide to new USATODAY.com features – USATODAY.com

Pluck: Leaders in Social Media

social media — 4 Comments
3
Mar 07

Alternative Media Sites Targetting Social Media

This is something that I hadn’t noticed before but it seems the fact that Digg users don’t take kindly to any kind of controversy (since it sparks a tug of war between positive and negative votes). Many alternative media sites are chiming in on the recent Wired feature on Digg, even going so far as echoing the content in posts such as Is Digg Rigged? or even taking the content wholesale such as Hunting Down Digg’s Bury Brigade.

Maybe LittleGreenFootballs & PrisonPlanet see Digg as an enticing platform to push their message across to the world. On the surface, all you need are X number of votes and you’re on stage. However, with buries life is rarely that easy. Once the community “marks” a blog or website you’re pretty much dead on Digg as the so-called “unbanning” of domains actually proved. You might get away with one or two front page stories the first time but after you shove something down a social media site’s throat the community naturally strikes back.

In the case of Digg you get the peculiar phenomenon of “so many Diggs but nowhere to go”.

As you would expect, getting their stories consistently buried only incites and fuels the already paranoid crowd of conspiracy theorists and the radical right.

prisonplanet_digg.png

One of the things that add fuel to the fire for these sites, aside from the fact that Digg is the biggest social media outlet, is the fact that only positive votes (Diggs) are public while and the public score remains unadjusted for negative votes. Naturally, when these sites see their submissions reach upwards of 300-900 votes in a short period of time yet get buried it infuriates them (even though the real vote count maybe -50). This only creates a vicious cycle despite the fact they have even less success on other sites.

This might be a good opportunity to show some kind of visual metric for how much a story is being buried or simply adjusting the Diggs on a story appropriately.

At the very least it is confusing the legitimate debate of making the community better by effectively balancing the negative sway of anonymous buries and giving the opportunity to radical/alternative sites to push their agenda against the will of the greater community.

social media — 2 Comments
2
Mar 07

Wired’s Incoherent Coverage of Digg

All the big media sites just went on a Digg bonanza starting with the three articles from Wired: Herding the Mob, I Bought Votes on Digg, and Hunting Down Digg’s Bury Brigade(which is really David’s article on NewAssignment). With additional mention from BoingBoing and of course Michael Arrington calling on Digg to sue Wired because Wired is a sister company to competitor Reddit (or maybe Mike is just having a bad day).

The main article, “Herding the Mob” is really a sorry excuse of an article as mentioned elsewhere simply because it’s lumping the Ebay rating system with social news. Oddly, the main article is mostly about Ebay’s seller reputation system and how it affects sales and only mentions social news sites in passing while the other two articles are solely focused on Digg. It’s as if the author took a story on Ebay to the editor and was told to make it about Digg instead to ride the recent buzz of negativity.

If you discount the main article, you have two interesting pieces that are at odds. In one piece, the main author details how she bought Digg votes and succeeded in getting her otherwise boring blog on the Digg frontpage (and was promptly buried). In the other David explores the implications of Digg’s so-called “bury brigade”. Basically, you have one article showing the bury system succeeding to keep an unworthy article off the front page while the other explores the implications of informal censorship and passionate users trying to get to the bottom questions unanswered by Digg the company.

In an effort to prove that “Scammers Manipulate the Mob” they pretty much hand us back an inconclusive picture. One thing for sure is that the Digg’s algorithm for catching scammers isn’t as good as all the eyeballs on Digg as proclaimed by the CEO.

CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg “have failed,” and that Digg “can tell when there are paid users.” Adelson added, “When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don’t remove their account so they don’t realize they’ve been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn’t work.”

I Bought Votes on Digg

This all takes us back to the original question. Who controls Digg? Aside from some moderating action from the company, the answer is probably everybody and nobody. The problem with the “bury brigade” is not that there are people burying stories (as you can see it had the desired effect of burying the story the Wired reporter bought) but the fact that its implementation is also open to abuse to push an agenda. I think the Digg-rigging scam also highlights another aspect, that sometimes it’s hard for a good story to hit the front page without the right elements (being submitted by a power user, etc.).

A lot of times when I monitor my submissions I note the sudden pickup in activity once a story’s font gets bigger (from having more diggs) in the upcoming cloud view. The fact is the majority of users would “rather not waste their time” pruning upcoming stories and this is why high ranking users and people pushing an agenda with their buries can both exert more influence on the process.

Kevin Rose finally does speak out on the issue with a statement on their official blog:

For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works. We spend a lot of time analyzing our data and understanding how people Digg and bury content. We have spent the last 2.5 yrs building systems that ensure a diverse group of users promote or bury stories.

For what it’s worth, and to shift the blame off of the users listed here – quite a bit of this data was gathered inaccurately as the author states in the Digg comments. Please also note, due to the massive number of Diggs/submissions/buries and comments, Digg spy only shows a portion of the activity within Digg at any time.

Digg the Blog » Blog Archive » On Buries and Blocking

However, all this brings me back to the original controversy surrounding the removal of the top users list. If the system has been improved over 2.5 years, why suddenly strip that out? Also, they’ve dumbed down the friend feature quite a bit some time back, making it harder to manage friends. Why? Also, the submissions from power users had died down quite a bit, though not completely, and I think that it still shows in the quality of submissions on the front page.

It was interesting to see this whole issue, originally raised by the community, taken to the next level by the big outlets. Most of the opinions out there are just that but with more discussions, maybe this will lead to genuine improvements.

Wired 15.03: Herding the Mob

Wired News: I Bought Votes on Digg

Wired News: Hunting Down Digg’s Bury Brigade

Boing Boing: Tricking the social voting sites

Wired and Annalee Newitz Drop the Ball – Sugarrae

social media — No Comments
2
Mar 07

Wired’s Incoherent Coverage of Digg

All the big media sites just went on a Digg bonanza starting with the three articles from Wired: Herding the Mob, I Bought Votes on Digg, and Hunting Down Digg’s Bury Brigade(which is really David’s article on NewAssignment). With additional mention from BoingBoing and of course Michael Arrington calling on Digg to sue Wired because Wired is a sister company to competitor Reddit (or maybe Mike is just having a bad day).

The main article, “Herding the Mob” is really a sorry excuse of an article as mentioned elsewhere simply because it’s lumping the Ebay rating system with social news. Oddly, the main article is mostly about Ebay’s seller reputation system and how it affects sales and only mentions social news sites in passing while the other two articles are solely focused on Digg. It’s as if the author took a story on Ebay to the editor and was told to make it about Digg instead to ride the recent buzz of negativity.

If you discount the main article, you have two interesting pieces that are at odds. In one piece, the main author details how she bought Digg votes and succeeded in getting her otherwise boring blog on the Digg frontpage (and was promptly buried). In the other David explores the implications of Digg’s so-called “bury brigade”. Basically, you have one article showing the bury system succeeding to keep an unworthy article off the front page while the other explores the implications of informal censorship and passionate users trying to get to the bottom questions unanswered by Digg the company.

In an effort to prove that “Scammers Manipulate the Mob” they pretty much hand us back an inconclusive picture. One thing for sure is that the Digg’s algorithm for catching scammers isn’t as good as all the eyeballs on Digg as proclaimed by the CEO.

CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg “have failed,” and that Digg “can tell when there are paid users.” Adelson added, “When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don’t remove their account so they don’t realize they’ve been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn’t work.”

I Bought Votes on Digg

This all takes us back to the original question. Who controls Digg? Aside from some moderating action from the company, the answer is probably everybody and nobody. The problem with the “bury brigade” is not that there are people burying stories (as you can see it had the desired effect of burying the story the Wired reporter bought) but the fact that its implementation is also open to abuse to push an agenda. I think the Digg-rigging scam also highlights another aspect, that sometimes it’s hard for a good story to hit the front page without the right elements (being submitted by a power user, etc.).

A lot of times when I monitor my submissions I note the sudden pickup in activity once a story’s font gets bigger (from having more diggs) in the upcoming cloud view. The fact is the majority of users would “rather not waste their time” pruning upcoming stories and this is why high ranking users and people pushing an agenda with their buries can both exert more influence on the process.

Kevin Rose finally does speak out on the issue with a statement on their official blog:

For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works. We spend a lot of time analyzing our data and understanding how people Digg and bury content. We have spent the last 2.5 yrs building systems that ensure a diverse group of users promote or bury stories.

For what it’s worth, and to shift the blame off of the users listed here – quite a bit of this data was gathered inaccurately as the author states in the Digg comments. Please also note, due to the massive number of Diggs/submissions/buries and comments, Digg spy only shows a portion of the activity within Digg at any time.

Digg the Blog » Blog Archive » On Buries and Blocking

However, all this brings me back to the original controversy surrounding the removal of the top users list. If the system has been improved over 2.5 years, why suddenly strip that out? Also, they’ve dumbed down the friend feature quite a bit some time back, making it harder to manage friends. Why? Also, the submissions from power users had died down quite a bit, though not completely, and I think that it still shows in the quality of submissions on the front page.

It was interesting to see this whole issue, originally raised by the community, taken to the next level by the big outlets. Most of the opinions out there are just that but with more discussions, maybe this will lead to genuine improvements.

Wired 15.03: Herding the Mob

Wired News: I Bought Votes on Digg

Wired News: Hunting Down Digg’s Bury Brigade

Boing Boing: Tricking the social voting sites

Wired and Annalee Newitz Drop the Ball – Sugarrae

social media — 36 Comments
28
Feb 07

A Tribute to the Unsung Heroes of Digg (Bury Brigade Top 50)

I’m sure some of you have noticed a big story today of how David LeMieux uncovered the name of Digg users executing buries through a Digg flaw thanks to Muhammad Saleem’s report. The flaw was patched shortly giving David access to 1700+ buries including the user name and stories buried. Unfortunately, it’s a raw massive list.

I’ve calculated (and unfortunately I’m weak in this area so correct me if wrong) that 207 users executed 1665 buries (around 8 per user) after weeding out users recorded for two stories.

However, don’t take this list as the truth, as David notes elsewhere:

Yeah, the real to false ratio was about 1:4 so one out of every 4 burries was actually committed by the user. They have apparently fixed the hole, and quite quickly too.
Take it with a grain of salt. Yet even with all the false data, some people are as diligent with their burying as the top submitters.

So, without further ado here are the users with most buries showing the number of buries in parentheses and a link to their profile followed by some of the most unpopular stories.

What does this tell us? Who knows. I’m not even going to comment but you’ll find some interesting discussions in the references at the very bottom.

The Top Buriers


  1. glenjammin(275)

  2. ahsen74(94)

  3. adm58(94)

  4. miketrin(93)

  5. raistlinmajere(59)

  6. hhp2k(38)

  7. bigbill62629(30)

  8. txcinc(28)

  9. goatomatic(27)

  10. saintdogbert(26)

  11. phinnfort(26)

  12. edgeoforever(24)

  13. sentone(23)

  14. lotus22(22)

  15. undefined(21)

  16. disposablerob(20)

  17. tsunamisteve(20)

  18. bglodde(19)

  19. kingofthegreens(17)

  20. naio21(17)

  21. tracon(16)

  22. saikhan(16)

  23. framitz(14)

  24. canewediggit(14)

  25. dilesmavis(14)

  26. bradisbest(14)

  27. arkanok(14)

  28. waysa(13)

  29. bluesbyrd(13)

  30. registration11(12)

  31. offcamber(12)

  32. willis77(11)

  33. burmask(11)

  34. mushoo(11)

  35. whiskeymb(11)

  36. kylesellers(10)

  37. novusopiate(10)

  38. evil-doer(10)

  39. harumph(10)

  40. tu13erhead(9)

  41. shiftt(9)

  42. otto(9)

  43. chaseb(9)

  44. emmsee(9)

  45. batfink(8)

  46. jlunski(8)

  47. cameron074(8)

  48. schezar(8)

  49. carpeaqua(7)

  50. mariod505(7)

The Most Buried Stories

References

Digg Expose Data


The Bury Brigade Exists, and Here’s My Proof


Deep Jive Interests » Digg’s Dark Future And The Battle For Online Censorship


Digg’s Bury Feature Needs a Funeral at Reeverb

Files
For those of you that want to see the whole list and play with the data, I’ve made the CSV file and some of the raw processed stuff. I’d throw in the amateur scripts I used too but it would be too embarrassing to publish.

The File

blog / exclusive / social media / web — 9 Comments
26
Feb 07

Exclusive (for now) Interview with Digg’s Favorite Photographer Trey Ratcliff

Trey Ratcliff is an amazing photographer making a name for himself with a slew of amazing photographs that have populated Digg’s front page so much that he has been dubbed “Digg’s favorite HDR photographer”.

Some of his well known works of cityscapes at night are haunting. They look more like neo-futuristic cities rendered by the best graphics engine that money could buy yet “real” at the same time. However, his subject matter and technique is more diverse than you would imagine as evidenced by his selected portfolio. He’s captured amazing scenes and amazing people from countries all over the world documented in part at his entertaining blog “Stuck In Customs”.

However, what most people don’t know is that Trey Ratcliff is not a professional photographer in the sense that he earns his primary living from photography. In fact, Trey is the CEO of a game development company with a background programming advanced mathematical algorithms for a variety of projects after graduating from Southern Methodist University where he studied computer science and mathematics.

The man behind the camera just might be more fascinating than the photographs that he is famous for. Trey was kind enough the grant me an email interview you will find below.


Interview with Trey Ratcliff

Q: Briefly, tell us a little about yourself and what you do outside of photography? What is your background? What are your other interests?

A: First, I would flip around your question and say that I do photography outside of my real-life job, which is running an online game company, John Galt Games. All of our amazing products are currently in development, and I am very proud of them. However, I can’t talk about any details yet.

My background is Computer Science and Math, although I have always enjoyed the creative side of life. Computer Science is actually a branch of philosophy, so it has helped to frame the world for me as a series of intersecting segments and pattern-recognition.

Other interests include reading; I alternate from one book to another between fiction and non-fiction. The fiction is usually fantasy, sci-fi, or cyberpunk. The non-fiction is a lot of sociology, economics, and history. I find it a personal challenge to rip through a book per week, especially while people keep sending me YouTube videos and sucking up my free cycles!

Q: What initially got you interested in photography? When did you start pursuing it seriously? Was there a specific moment when you found your current style?

A: I started getting serious about photography nine months ago. That is when I got my first DSLR and dove into new and evolving techniques in digital photography. HDR was just starting up and there were some interesting efforts, and I was anxious to see if I could help to evolve the artform. There are many great photographers out there that do this sort of work, and I am pleased to be working with them to take this exciting evolution through the next cycle.

When I choose to do something with my life, I am quite intense and competitive. I find that photography is a good outlet for my creativity because, otherwise, my ADD brain gets involved with too many projects at the same time. I’ve learned it is very hard to execute on every “good idea’ that one may spawn. A “good idea’ for a photograph though has a pretty short lifecycle before it is complete, so it is nice to have a quick-cycle alpha to omega process for creativity. Games take forever to make, in comparison, as do other forms of art – painting, movies, theater, etc – there is a tremendous amount of time and effort to produce a product. Photography, by comparison, is a very satisfying medium to quickly share creativity and production with consumers.

Q: You have an interesting background in computer science and video games. Does this inform or shape the world view captured in your photos? What are some of the common themes you find yourself coming back to time and again?

One aspect of my photography probably is related to personal eye problems. I really only see out of my left eye. My right eye is useless. As a child I had a few failed surgeries, and tried everything from eye patches to Hubble-size corrective lenses. Nothing has worked, and to this day, I still read and see with mostly my left eye and my right eye is like Dwight’s dead vestigial twin. Seeing the world in 2D, effectively, during my formative years, threw the right side of my brain into a unique compositional pattern-matcher. I am convinced that I record visual information differently than other people. For example, I played a lot of soccer, so I had to record every diameter of that ball to know how close it was to my foot since I didn’t really have 3D vision. Stereoscopic memories and imagery is stored differently than these 2D patterns – so my entire brain has oriented itself towards a shape-pattern world and associated all memory, thoughts, and creativity around this visual information. Honestly, I don’t know exactly how this translates into my photography, but I certainly think there is some kind of connection.

This feeds into my personal thoughts and ruminations on pattern-matching. Our brains are cellular-automata-based computing machines that are spawned by patterns and respond to patterns. Some music is pleasant to people because they recognize similar patterns they associate with good emotions. Photography is similar and can be an elegant mathematical pattern-matching experience.

Aspects of beauty and pattern-evolution adhere to phi, the Golden Ratio. Our brains are naturally drawn to phi patterns and good photographers can effortlessly compose photos to orient the shapes to hit that ratio. Your entire life, your brain has recognized true beauty in the phi ratio because it is important for evolution. Humans seek the opposite sex with that has phi-ratios in their face, bodies, etc. because it indicates good health and disease resistance. We also like to look at landscapes, flowers, and other natural beauty, which perfectly adheres to this same ratio. So when photographers can re-create the phi ratio in a perfect photograph, it is just naturally pleasing.

A good example of the phi ratio is “This Is Vespucci” (one of my pics from Rome). The proportions are phi, the compositions are phi, and the coloring and lighting is in phi as well. The colors of his face are the same as the background, but the textures of his face are the same as the wood, which is a phi-distance away across the noiseless white space.

HDR brings the phi ratio to colors and luminosity rather than to geometry and angles. Humans use their neocortex to patch together a visual scene. People do not take a “photograph” in their head and store it at a single shutter speed, aperture, etc. On the scene, the human eye is constantly darting around and the iris lets in more light in some areas and less light in others. This “patchwork quilt” is made up of very different light levels and colors. These most beautiful scenes have colors that lay on top of the geometric patterns that traipse up and down the spectrum in a phi pattern. I’m slowing evolving my HDR process to nail those phi patterns within color and luminosity to bring a visceral reaction of beauty from the viewer.

Q: What’s the idea behind the name “Stuck in Customs”? It seems open to multiple interpretations: a perpetual traveller or people trapped in “certain customs” that prevents them from appreciating the wider world around them. What’s the motivation behind writing this blog?

A: You have the dual meaning correct. I am conterminously and antithetically both very judgmental of other cultures and very open to other cultures at the same time. Since I travel a lot, I see a bit of everything. I see Russian men of my age that grew up during the cold war and used to play outside with their friends, having simulated Red Dawn firefights with the evil Americans. I see Indians that are rigorous and serious with their children while preparing them for the confusing anachronism of arranged marriages and then see a modern Bollywood music video where the dancers and dirty dancing around a grapefruit tree. I see angry Muslim men with ninja-dressed wives from Saudi Arabia and I see diet-Muslims in headscarves that laugh and dance around Malaysia. I see deeply religious catholic Costa Rican women and Italian Catholic women that stay out till three AM, not doing Catholic things. I think it is interesting how culture is getting mixed and mashed and combined with a new move towards globalism and mass media dissemination of popular cultures, all fighting to win a mindshare of the Earth’s five billion people.

Overall, I’ve learned that people are pretty much the same around the world. I have two Iranians that work for me and are some of the sharpest programmers and nicest guys in the world. They have a tremendous sense of humor and we sit around and poke fun at the world of politics and how crazy everything is. As a CEO and a Blogger with over a quarter million readers, I am actually doing my own little bit for world peace by helping to interconnect the world with capitalism and information. People talk too much about “democracy” as what makes things peaceful, but it is really the free trade of goods, services, and information that brings things together.

Like everything, the blog has evolved. It started as something for my mom – so she could keep up with my travels and me. After I really got into photography, I thought it would be a good medium to share my work. Contemporaneously, my photography became suddenly popular at Flickr, which ended up getting me nominated for the 2007 Bloggies. None of this was a master-plan… it just sort of happened.

Q: You’ve travelled the world extensively. Is there anywhere you still want to travel to? What is the most memorable destination you’ve been to and why? What makes travel attractive to you?

A: There are many places I would love to visit and many cultures I would like to experience. I need to visit all over India and remote parts of China. I think the UAE looks incredible as well as other places that have stayed unique, like Morocco and southern Spain.

My favorite place I have been for photography is Iceland. That place is just insane. It’s like Yellowstone times ten.

Contrary to what appears obvious, I don’t travel just to travel. I travel for work, and many of these places are quite far from home in Texas. I often end up with spare time in the morning or over a weekend if it is a long trip, so I use that time to go out and get lost in these new places. For example, I spend a lot of time in Kuala Lumpur because we have a game studio there. I end up having to stay a few weekends – rather than stay in the hotel, I just buy a cheap plane ticket for $150 or so, get a cheapo hotel, and go hit Thailand for a few days. Why not? Nothing to be scared of…

I equate these little get-out-of-the-hotel-moments to reading The Economist. I don’t believe anyone that says they read every article inside every single Economist. However, I always force myself to read a few extra articles and then I think, “That was an interesting article. I’m glad I read it.” This is the same as coming home and saying, “Wow that floating market in Thailand was really cool. I’m glad I went.” It is tiring, but usually worth it in the end. Luckily, I only sleep a few hours per night so I end up with extra cycles.

Q: What are some of your goals and aspirations for photography?

A: I don’t really have any goals per se. I’d like to continue to experiment and improve. I look back on my old stuff in horror… and I wonder if I will look back on my new stuff with horror too as well – I hope I do!

Q: Has the recent exposure to a new audience changed anything either for you or your older fans? How do you feel about it in general?

A: I don’t know. I’m certainly a student of media and social networks, so it has only become recently obvious to me that there are people that create media and people that consume media. Creators are also consumers, but the typical media consumer can now create media along with the best, with tools like Flickr, YouTube, and blogs.

This technology creates a true media meritocracy. I don’t know how many hits the National Geographic Site gets, but in February I am getting well over 250,000 visits. My posting about a trip to Chernobyl got over a hundred thousand hits within just a few hours. My Flickr shots get direct hits of many more than this as well, especially because of DIGG. DIGG has taken about a half-dozen of my shots over 75,000 views each and one is over 200,000 views – in just a few days. This is not bad for a one-man show that spends 5-10 minutes every morning posting a blog entry and is probably why traditional media outlets are nervous about News and Media 2.0.

One thing that has changed recently is how much I write and my approach to it. I’ve adopted a bit of a Mark Twain “Innocents Abroad” tact. Innocents Abroad was Twain’s first big seller and it was from his post-civil war cruise overseas to visit Italy and Greece and the Holy Land. He took the opportunity to lampoon traditional boring travel books and used a disarming and irreverent choice of words to describe amazing places. I can’t do exactly the same thing, of course, because I am using photography, and it is silly to use overly descriptive and beautiful language to describe something that is already right in front of the viewer. So my tact has shifted to a fantastic retelling of stories that surround the picture with a hand-to-god swearing of actual events. Of course, none of these events are terribly accurate, but my brain is vacillating always between a dream state and a reality state, so it is real in its own way.

Q: What can we expect from Trey Ratcliff in 2007 and beyond?

A: I’ve got a huge backlog of photos that I need to process when I get 10 minutes to rub together. I think some of the best from Iceland are still to come, along with a few other unique places that I have not had a chance to process yet. I don’t have any solid plans on travel… just wherever work is gonna take me. Honestly, I hope it takes me home so I can spend more time with my family.

Q: Any final remarks?

A: The color spectrum we see the world in is extremely limited, but that will change in the next 10 to 15 years as people evolve to get eye implants that both improve vision and can see (and record) new wavelengths beyond the current visible spectrum.

There are already a few mutant tetrachromatics currently alive today that see four colors, one order of magnitude beyond the exiting three-axis RGB scale. To envision what these people see is like someone that is color-blind envisioning what seeing color is like.

Imagine if we are able to see a larger spectrum, like honeybees or machine spectroscopy. The world would be full of new information. The wavelengths of infrared and ultraviolet are the obvious ones, but there is also a world of chomoluminescence around us the thermal infrared. How could we use this new visual information? It’s hard to say but colors helped humans to differentiate things: red fruit is often bad, but a red behind on another monkey is good (if you are a male monkey looking to replicate).

The more visual information humans have, the better decisions we can make on how to interact with people and nature – and the more beauty we can see in the world. I’m sure that I see the world in a more beautiful way than someone that is color-blind, so I look forward to being able to increase my visual capability in the near future.

HDR photography is only a first step in dipping my toe into an evolving visual future. Via this style of photography, we’ve begun to see the world in new ways and appreciate dynamic luminosity in real and tangible ways. I think, in the end, that it’s all art, and even the beholder is evolving.

Interviewer’s Note

First of all, if you’ve arrived here after reading the entire interview, thank you. Trey was a real pleasure to work with and his answers just blew me away. He’s the digital renaissance man in the truest sense. Thank your for giving me this opportunity Trey.

For those of you looking to usurp Trey of his claim to being “Digg’s most popular HDR photographer”, you could always start with his newly updated HDR Tutorial. It even has a nice discount coupon for the software he uses to make these amazing images. It’s also great because you get to take a peek into his artistic process. Check it out.

blog / exclusive / social media / web — No Comments
26
Feb 07

Exclusive (for now) Interview with Digg’s Favorite Photographer Trey Ratcliff

Trey Ratcliff is an amazing photographer making a name for himself with a slew of amazing photographs that have populated Digg’s front page so much that he has been dubbed “Digg’s favorite HDR photographer”.

Some of his well known works of cityscapes at night are haunting. They look more like neo-futuristic cities rendered by the best graphics engine that money could buy yet “real” at the same time. However, his subject matter and technique is more diverse than you would imagine as evidenced by his selected portfolio. He’s captured amazing scenes and amazing people from countries all over the world documented in part at his entertaining blog “Stuck In Customs”.

However, what most people don’t know is that Trey Ratcliff is not a professional photographer in the sense that he earns his primary living from photography. In fact, Trey is the CEO of a game development company with a background programming advanced mathematical algorithms for a variety of projects after graduating from Southern Methodist University where he studied computer science and mathematics.

The man behind the camera just might be more fascinating than the photographs that he is famous for. Trey was kind enough the grant me an email interview you will find below.


Interview with Trey Ratcliff

Q: Briefly, tell us a little about yourself and what you do outside of photography? What is your background? What are your other interests?

A: First, I would flip around your question and say that I do photography outside of my real-life job, which is running an online game company, John Galt Games. All of our amazing products are currently in development, and I am very proud of them. However, I can’t talk about any details yet.

My background is Computer Science and Math, although I have always enjoyed the creative side of life. Computer Science is actually a branch of philosophy, so it has helped to frame the world for me as a series of intersecting segments and pattern-recognition.

Other interests include reading; I alternate from one book to another between fiction and non-fiction. The fiction is usually fantasy, sci-fi, or cyberpunk. The non-fiction is a lot of sociology, economics, and history. I find it a personal challenge to rip through a book per week, especially while people keep sending me YouTube videos and sucking up my free cycles!

Q: What initially got you interested in photography? When did you start pursuing it seriously? Was there a specific moment when you found your current style?

A: I started getting serious about photography nine months ago. That is when I got my first DSLR and dove into new and evolving techniques in digital photography. HDR was just starting up and there were some interesting efforts, and I was anxious to see if I could help to evolve the artform. There are many great photographers out there that do this sort of work, and I am pleased to be working with them to take this exciting evolution through the next cycle.

When I choose to do something with my life, I am quite intense and competitive. I find that photography is a good outlet for my creativity because, otherwise, my ADD brain gets involved with too many projects at the same time. I’ve learned it is very hard to execute on every “good idea’ that one may spawn. A “good idea’ for a photograph though has a pretty short lifecycle before it is complete, so it is nice to have a quick-cycle alpha to omega process for creativity. Games take forever to make, in comparison, as do other forms of art – painting, movies, theater, etc – there is a tremendous amount of time and effort to produce a product. Photography, by comparison, is a very satisfying medium to quickly share creativity and production with consumers.

Q: You have an interesting background in computer science and video games. Does this inform or shape the world view captured in your photos? What are some of the common themes you find yourself coming back to time and again?

One aspect of my photography probably is related to personal eye problems. I really only see out of my left eye. My right eye is useless. As a child I had a few failed surgeries, and tried everything from eye patches to Hubble-size corrective lenses. Nothing has worked, and to this day, I still read and see with mostly my left eye and my right eye is like Dwight’s dead vestigial twin. Seeing the world in 2D, effectively, during my formative years, threw the right side of my brain into a unique compositional pattern-matcher. I am convinced that I record visual information differently than other people. For example, I played a lot of soccer, so I had to record every diameter of that ball to know how close it was to my foot since I didn’t really have 3D vision. Stereoscopic memories and imagery is stored differently than these 2D patterns – so my entire brain has oriented itself towards a shape-pattern world and associated all memory, thoughts, and creativity around this visual information. Honestly, I don’t know exactly how this translates into my photography, but I certainly think there is some kind of connection.

This feeds into my personal thoughts and ruminations on pattern-matching. Our brains are cellular-automata-based computing machines that are spawned by patterns and respond to patterns. Some music is pleasant to people because they recognize similar patterns they associate with good emotions. Photography is similar and can be an elegant mathematical pattern-matching experience.

Aspects of beauty and pattern-evolution adhere to phi, the Golden Ratio. Our brains are naturally drawn to phi patterns and good photographers can effortlessly compose photos to orient the shapes to hit that ratio. Your entire life, your brain has recognized true beauty in the phi ratio because it is important for evolution. Humans seek the opposite sex with that has phi-ratios in their face, bodies, etc. because it indicates good health and disease resistance. We also like to look at landscapes, flowers, and other natural beauty, which perfectly adheres to this same ratio. So when photographers can re-create the phi ratio in a perfect photograph, it is just naturally pleasing.

A good example of the phi ratio is “This Is Vespucci” (one of my pics from Rome). The proportions are phi, the compositions are phi, and the coloring and lighting is in phi as well. The colors of his face are the same as the background, but the textures of his face are the same as the wood, which is a phi-distance away across the noiseless white space.

HDR brings the phi ratio to colors and luminosity rather than to geometry and angles. Humans use their neocortex to patch together a visual scene. People do not take a “photograph” in their head and store it at a single shutter speed, aperture, etc. On the scene, the human eye is constantly darting around and the iris lets in more light in some areas and less light in others. This “patchwork quilt” is made up of very different light levels and colors. These most beautiful scenes have colors that lay on top of the geometric patterns that traipse up and down the spectrum in a phi pattern. I’m slowing evolving my HDR process to nail those phi patterns within color and luminosity to bring a visceral reaction of beauty from the viewer.

Q: What’s the idea behind the name “Stuck in Customs”? It seems open to multiple interpretations: a perpetual traveller or people trapped in “certain customs” that prevents them from appreciating the wider world around them. What’s the motivation behind writing this blog?

A: You have the dual meaning correct. I am conterminously and antithetically both very judgmental of other cultures and very open to other cultures at the same time. Since I travel a lot, I see a bit of everything. I see Russian men of my age that grew up during the cold war and used to play outside with their friends, having simulated Red Dawn firefights with the evil Americans. I see Indians that are rigorous and serious with their children while preparing them for the confusing anachronism of arranged marriages and then see a modern Bollywood music video where the dancers and dirty dancing around a grapefruit tree. I see angry Muslim men with ninja-dressed wives from Saudi Arabia and I see diet-Muslims in headscarves that laugh and dance around Malaysia. I see deeply religious catholic Costa Rican women and Italian Catholic women that stay out till three AM, not doing Catholic things. I think it is interesting how culture is getting mixed and mashed and combined with a new move towards globalism and mass media dissemination of popular cultures, all fighting to win a mindshare of the Earth’s five billion people.

Overall, I’ve learned that people are pretty much the same around the world. I have two Iranians that work for me and are some of the sharpest programmers and nicest guys in the world. They have a tremendous sense of humor and we sit around and poke fun at the world of politics and how crazy everything is. As a CEO and a Blogger with over a quarter million readers, I am actually doing my own little bit for world peace by helping to interconnect the world with capitalism and information. People talk too much about “democracy” as what makes things peaceful, but it is really the free trade of goods, services, and information that brings things together.

Like everything, the blog has evolved. It started as something for my mom – so she could keep up with my travels and me. After I really got into photography, I thought it would be a good medium to share my work. Contemporaneously, my photography became suddenly popular at Flickr, which ended up getting me nominated for the 2007 Bloggies. None of this was a master-plan… it just sort of happened.

Q: You’ve travelled the world extensively. Is there anywhere you still want to travel to? What is the most memorable destination you’ve been to and why? What makes travel attractive to you?

A: There are many places I would love to visit and many cultures I would like to experience. I need to visit all over India and remote parts of China. I think the UAE looks incredible as well as other places that have stayed unique, like Morocco and southern Spain.

My favorite place I have been for photography is Iceland. That place is just insane. It’s like Yellowstone times ten.

Contrary to what appears obvious, I don’t travel just to travel. I travel for work, and many of these places are quite far from home in Texas. I often end up with spare time in the morning or over a weekend if it is a long trip, so I use that time to go out and get lost in these new places. For example, I spend a lot of time in Kuala Lumpur because we have a game studio there. I end up having to stay a few weekends – rather than stay in the hotel, I just buy a cheap plane ticket for $150 or so, get a cheapo hotel, and go hit Thailand for a few days. Why not? Nothing to be scared of…

I equate these little get-out-of-the-hotel-moments to reading The Economist. I don’t believe anyone that says they read every article inside every single Economist. However, I always force myself to read a few extra articles and then I think, “That was an interesting article. I’m glad I read it.” This is the same as coming home and saying, “Wow that floating market in Thailand was really cool. I’m glad I went.” It is tiring, but usually worth it in the end. Luckily, I only sleep a few hours per night so I end up with extra cycles.

Q: What are some of your goals and aspirations for photography?

A: I don’t really have any goals per se. I’d like to continue to experiment and improve. I look back on my old stuff in horror… and I wonder if I will look back on my new stuff with horror too as well – I hope I do!

Q: Has the recent exposure to a new audience changed anything either for you or your older fans? How do you feel about it in general?

A: I don’t know. I’m certainly a student of media and social networks, so it has only become recently obvious to me that there are people that create media and people that consume media. Creators are also consumers, but the typical media consumer can now create media along with the best, with tools like Flickr, YouTube, and blogs.

This technology creates a true media meritocracy. I don’t know how many hits the National Geographic Site gets, but in February I am getting well over 250,000 visits. My posting about a trip to Chernobyl got over a hundred thousand hits within just a few hours. My Flickr shots get direct hits of many more than this as well, especially because of DIGG. DIGG has taken about a half-dozen of my shots over 75,000 views each and one is over 200,000 views – in just a few days. This is not bad for a one-man show that spends 5-10 minutes every morning posting a blog entry and is probably why traditional media outlets are nervous about News and Media 2.0.

One thing that has changed recently is how much I write and my approach to it. I’ve adopted a bit of a Mark Twain “Innocents Abroad” tact. Innocents Abroad was Twain’s first big seller and it was from his post-civil war cruise overseas to visit Italy and Greece and the Holy Land. He took the opportunity to lampoon traditional boring travel books and used a disarming and irreverent choice of words to describe amazing places. I can’t do exactly the same thing, of course, because I am using photography, and it is silly to use overly descriptive and beautiful language to describe something that is already right in front of the viewer. So my tact has shifted to a fantastic retelling of stories that surround the picture with a hand-to-god swearing of actual events. Of course, none of these events are terribly accurate, but my brain is vacillating always between a dream state and a reality state, so it is real in its own way.

Q: What can we expect from Trey Ratcliff in 2007 and beyond?

A: I’ve got a huge backlog of photos that I need to process when I get 10 minutes to rub together. I think some of the best from Iceland are still to come, along with a few other unique places that I have not had a chance to process yet. I don’t have any solid plans on travel… just wherever work is gonna take me. Honestly, I hope it takes me home so I can spend more time with my family.

Q: Any final remarks?

A: The color spectrum we see the world in is extremely limited, but that will change in the next 10 to 15 years as people evolve to get eye implants that both improve vision and can see (and record) new wavelengths beyond the current visible spectrum.

There are already a few mutant tetrachromatics currently alive today that see four colors, one order of magnitude beyond the exiting three-axis RGB scale. To envision what these people see is like someone that is color-blind envisioning what seeing color is like.

Imagine if we are able to see a larger spectrum, like honeybees or machine spectroscopy. The world would be full of new information. The wavelengths of infrared and ultraviolet are the obvious ones, but there is also a world of chomoluminescence around us the thermal infrared. How could we use this new visual information? It’s hard to say but colors helped humans to differentiate things: red fruit is often bad, but a red behind on another monkey is good (if you are a male monkey looking to replicate).

The more visual information humans have, the better decisions we can make on how to interact with people and nature – and the more beauty we can see in the world. I’m sure that I see the world in a more beautiful way than someone that is color-blind, so I look forward to being able to increase my visual capability in the near future.

HDR photography is only a first step in dipping my toe into an evolving visual future. Via this style of photography, we’ve begun to see the world in new ways and appreciate dynamic luminosity in real and tangible ways. I think, in the end, that it’s all art, and even the beholder is evolving.

Interviewer’s Note

First of all, if you’ve arrived here after reading the entire interview, thank you. Trey was a real pleasure to work with and his answers just blew me away. He’s the digital renaissance man in the truest sense. Thank your for giving me this opportunity Trey.

For those of you looking to usurp Trey of his claim to being “Digg’s most popular HDR photographer”, you could always start with his newly updated HDR Tutorial. It even has a nice discount coupon for the software he uses to make these amazing images. It’s also great because you get to take a peek into his artistic process. Check it out.

social media — 6 Comments
24
Feb 07

Did Digg Really Unban Blogs or is it a Database Malfunction?

The blogs are currently buzzing with the news that Digg has reinstated a list of domains previously banned or have they? There is still no official word on Digg’s company blog and I’m with Steve in thinking it’s some kind of a glitch. Not only are all Digg pages very slow to load, various queries take forever or return incomplete results.

Database Wonkiness

John Chow has returned in spectacular form only to get all promising stories buried and put on the fast track to another ban.

On top of that the query for all stories shows a duplicate:

johnchow_digg_glitch.png

General Amnesty or General Amnesia?

In fact, if you look at the list you’ll see that almost any and every blog that was banned seems to have been unbanned. Anything goes from high-quality tech blogs to celebrity gossip. Is this for real?

Everyone’s still waiting for official word but there is a high probability at this point that they tried to roll out changes and in the process corrupted some of the data, in particular the banned list.

The site loads very slow even when fully logged out. Now if you have lots of friends on Digg you know that the site practically crawls on you. However, if you logout things are actually quite snappy. Well, since the ban was lifted Digg is very slow either way and query results come back incomplete once out of every couple of times.

Same Crap Different Day

At the end of the day, whether the reinstatement is real or not nothing has really changed as long as the bury brigade is in place. They have responded to the news as they always have, by silently moving in to block these domains from enjoying their moment in the sun. In the case of John Chow he just got 4 stories buried in one day.

Will this actually mean anything? Not as long as Digg and the community:

  • Refuses to have an open dialog to establish a sane submission policy (what’s spam and what’s not)
  • Let the bury brigade run free and build increased hostility toward “non-authority” website owners

I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Update:

I guess it’s real. Explains the general sluggishness of the site too.

Digg Upgrades Spam Armor, Unblocks Sites

References:

Digg Lets Banned Domains Back In

Ramblings from the Marginalized » Data problems at Digg?

exclusive / social media — 4 Comments
23
Feb 07

Exclusive: Knuttz.net Owner Speaks Out

If you remember a couple weeks back I initiated a witch hunt on Sicc and Knuttz.net. I’m not even going to link to that as I’m sorry about the whole affair. Well, there’s been a lot of speculation on what Knuttz.net did or did not do to get so much traffic from Digg in such a short time.

The Knuttz.net owner was kind enough to share with me what he did and how he did it. To summarize, yes he did funnel his Digg traffic to ensure stories in the queue were given maximum exposure. However, he did not game the system with sock puppet accounts or any other shady maneuver.

Having read the account myself I really can’t see anything wrong with what he did. So far as I’m aware, I don’t know of any Digg TOS against funneling (not to be confused with switching Digg submit buttons for different stories which is wrong).

Basically, the owner of Knuttz.net:

  1. Closely, monitored Digg traffic & submissions for analysis
  2. Built traffic with link submissions to other sites
  3. Leveraged all outside/inside traffic to promote submitted stories that had the greatest chance of making the Digg front page
  4. Repeating it for the next story while traffic was still high.

That’s an amazing account that makes perfect sense to me. It’s probably a great strategy to follow but with moderation (you don’t want to be marked by Digg users like John Chow). Frankly, I don’t see anything wrong with this even though Knuttz.net has the advantage of lots of content with lots of traffic that can be easily funneled.

What follows is his account of how he achieved this. You be the judge. The content is reproduced with the owner’s permission. We corresponded to clarify any necessary areas with some editorial oversight (for the English).

Knuttz.net Owner Speaks

The following that I’ve read from the various blogs is right but in some cases incomplete.

1. The content met the Digg demographics: yes, no comment

2. I’ve funneled traffic to the page I’d want on Digg: yes, BUT I did build traffic to give it a natural “kick start”.

False allegations I’ve read:

1. I made the site exclusively for Digg: no, I just ignored Digg in the past.

2. Did I cheat Digg? no, I will explain the whole process.

Let me counter the false allegations in detail.

1. I made the site exclusively for Digg

No, the site just used to run under a different domain name: http://knuttz.yi.org

You can see a link from Fark in 2003 – http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=674694

Or even this link from Digg in 2005: http://digg.com/tech_news/DIY:_origami_CD_case

In the past, I’ve made submissions to Digg without thinking too much about it. And most of the links I had didn’t match the “Tech” audience’s demand. It’s only in the last months that the “Offbeat News” traffic became interesting, actually, I was pretty much surprised to see the traffic it generated in the beginning of January. I was posting links only sporadically, at that point, I was still thinking that the “Offbeat News” still wasn’t really a great deal, as was the “Tech news”.

In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to the “Offbeat News” category during its growth process.

2. Did I cheat Digg ?

No I didn’t but evaluate for yourself. It was just the result of common sense and some analysis.

1. I kept monitoring Digg to see submissions from my site

2. Keep monitoring traffic on my pages to identify heavy traffic and double-checking those results with other digg submissions made by other users.

3. Checked the topic; it is useless to promote off-topic links.

4. When was the link submitted?

5. Whenever a link was submitted, I’ve checked the submitter, to see his/her rank.

6. If the link had already been dugg, I’d checked the diggers who have done it (just how many front page histories they had).

The most important thing is cross number 1 and 2. The links that appear in both were the ones with higher chances to make Digg front page. You can always submit yourself, but, it will be way harder to get your link promoted (well at least the first one).

Number 3 is a big deal, if the link is off topic, is pointless to promote it.

Number 4 is one of the most important, the most daylight time a link gets, higher is the probability to get promoted, the best time is around 9AM EST.

Who submitted and who dugg, comes next. High ranked submitters, and diggers with some links promoted in the history helps great deal.

Based on these, you choose the page in which you’ll center you fire power (funneling) on.

That was how I got links on the front page in series. BUT, although whole “funneling” stuff is right, and choosing where to funnel is crucial, this is a part of establishing a “virtuous cycle”, the hard part, the real hard part, is to make it start spinning. You need to “kick start” the process naturally.

Digg is great site to boost your site’s traffic, actually it is amazing. But to increase your chances, submitting to Digg is the LAST step in the ladder.

In my case there is something that helps a lot, dozens of middle sized sites and quite a few large sites are interested in my kind of content and happily link to me when I submit a link to them.

To get the “kick start”, what I’ve made was to submit my site to the “x” number of link sites and waited as I’ve done so many times. But at one specific moment, I had the perfect condition: some of them linked the same page on the same day and concentrated a very good amount of visitors in something like 6 or so hours.

And I was able to detect the beginning of the traffic.

See, according to Alexa, Digg reachs around 0,9% of all internet users. If you can generate traffic 30.000 visits to a specific page in your site, there is a good probability that 270 of them are Digg users. If only 15% of these users like the page and click the Digg button, you’re gonna place your history in the first page of the “upcoming links” in any category within a few hours. That’s the place your history must be. If you can get there in the first 8 hours, you have a very good chance to get promoted to the front page, it is just a matter of time. The cycle started.

After the first link, you gonna have Digg traffic for a couple days, and than the funneling will do it’s work. But, you must not stop promoting your site outside Digg, in some cases you will need the “kick start” when the cycle slow down.

So this is the big catch. First you generate traffic from other sites, THEN you focus on Digg. That’s what I did, and nobody could see.

What can I advice anyone to do?

1. Build good traffic outside Digg. Search for sites that can drive traffic to you, in your niche. Be participative in community forums, even if that mean to post your content in the forum, and losing some possible visitors in the beginning (your forum signature makes a great ad).

2. Digg is NOT the place to start building traffic (unless you get submitted by a high ranker – although there is no rank anymore, you can check the submmiter to see which of his histories made the front page), it is the place to burst your traffic. So, do not submit links that do not have not already generated good traffic.

3. Watch your traffic very closely, use some kind of real time stats that at least shows your top referrer and most viewed page(s).

4. Do not add the Digg button in all your pages. Do it only in pages where you can detect a good amount of traffic. The very same way people get used to where you place your ads, and ignore them, will get used to and ignore the Digg button.

What do I think I’ve done wrong?

I got carried way by the success of the funneling technique. If I had slowed down in the beginning, it would have been less stressful.

social media — 4 Comments
20
Feb 07

Digging Your Own Grave: Selective Censorship and Social Media

I was reading this article about internet censorship in Russia by government trolls thinking, “Gee that sounds like a social media site I know”. When is censorship on social media acceptable? Is tampering with voting results ever acceptable?

Recently, one of my readers submitted an article of mine to Digg. As a result, the story not only got buried but the reader got his account deleted.

My article wasn’t the only one buried. In fact, all stories critical of Digg or pointing to recent troubles are getting summarily buried. Some people are even starting to make unsubstantiated claims that Digg’s very own staff are behind this. One thing obvious is that Digg’s staff have no intentions of reigning in this behavior.

Taking a laissez faire approach to user actions may be a necessary part of survival for a social media site but obviously any actions of consequence (such as deleting an user or banning a site) requires administrative oversight. It’s obvious from the recent cases that Digg is exercising a form of selective censorship that is hurting their credibility.

One of the main problems with Digg’s form of censorship is that the staff seem to be on the side of Digg’s very own trolls and the infamous bury brigade. The question is, do they ever objectively review sites that fall into disfavor with their users?

It wouldn’t be much of a problem except for the fact that getting banned from Digg can have big consequences considering how even sites like TechCrunch still gets a large chunk of traffic from Digg. Now, supposing Digg banned TechCrunch it wouldn’t go away just like John Chow still manages to make $3000+ a month even after getting banned. However, for a small blog struggling to get noticed and breaking Digg’s unspoken rule to “never submit your site (especially too many times)” will find themselves struggling ever more with obscurity.

Why is this wrong? Consider the Digg story “Yahoo Shamelessly Rips Off Digg and Brags About It” for a minute (disclosure: this is my submission). This was an extremely popular story and collected close to 4500 diggs. As a result Digg’s users flooded Yahoo’s official blog with nasty comments and even vandalized Yahoo! suggestion boards. Digg staff can’t claim that they didn’t see it with its popularity on the front page and the firestorm of debate within the blogosphere that followed. Digg could have easily pulled a “marked as inaccurate” or simply bury the story knowing that leaving it on the front page would cause Digg users to take drastic measures. Instead, Digg did nothing to quell the controversy or speak out. Even a “yeah, the design looks similar but leave them alone” from a member of the staff or Kevin Rose himself would surely calm down the die hard fan boys.

Censorship like this rarely works on the internet, at least outside of China. If you want to control what people say about a web application, you’ll have to limit access to your corporate LAN. If anything, Digg’s recent actions and willingness to censor contending opinions is only making the din louder.

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