Social Bookmarking

The blogger GigaOm argues that Digg would benefit from gaining Stumbleupon's content and users. The question he leaves unanswered is whether the SU users would be likely to stay, given semi-recent press about Digg. If one company takes over another, which of the two sets policy on the acquired company's site?

Something from better times for a little company. Video of Larry Halff talking about his plans for open sourcing ma.gnolia.

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Points to a disproportionately large number of posts about the political candidate Ron Paul that were buried on Digg, in support of the premise of that so-called "bury brigades" exist on Digg, groups of users who vote against articles en masse when they don't like them, "philosophically". This should surprise absolutely nobody who is familiar with Digg's basic operating principles and has been online for more than ten minutes in his life, but sometimes people need evidence in support of the obvious. Putting the feeedom to be heard on a topic to a vote - how do people expect that to work out?

A list of article burials on Digg, along with the users who buried them. One does note that one is seeing a very few users doing a lot of burying. See link above, on my list of bookmarks.

Not only allegations that a small group of hyperaggressive users (50 in total) are burying posts on Digg, but with a little unexplained hacking being alluded to, the members of that local cabal are allegedly named. The question this raises being how much faith we should put in strangers who don't explain their methods - but then, if they did, we wouldn't be allowed to link to this article, would we? The fact that a search turned up 16900 hits for "Digg" and "bury brigade" does make this a little easier to believe, though, and a little more of a source of worry for the Stumbleupon user when he hears a suggestion that Digg take over that other service.

The article points us toward a reason why the business model alluded to in links above (paid for stumbles) is ultimately unsustainable - those visiting bounce through without doing much more than briefly glancing at the pages they visit, very often. This is plausible. People get enthusiastic about their new toy, they get a rhythm going, and they don't want to stop.

A very brief testimonial from another blogger.

Bringing this down to the bottom line, yet another blogger shares his experience, of watching people bounce away without doing much of anything on his site. How much is traffic like that to a site, and how much will somebody be willing to pay to keep getting more of it? As the author says, "The problem is that when I stumble I am in the mood for some fast action. I don't want to be bothered with heavy reading and just want to be amused." a spirit that, as somebody in one of the sites bookmarked above argues, Stumbleupon's business model gives the company and its management a perverse short term incentive to encourage. But can one encourage impatience and then, moments later, hope that impatience will suddenly vanish the moment a visitor reaches a sponsor's site? Or does behavior, once reinforced, tend to linger? Does the company really expect those sponsors to not notice that their bottom line isn't being helped, just because they hope it will, and assume that it must?

A group I've created as a gathering pplace for users of that service. So far (I'm posting this on 8:35 pm on March 15, 2009) there seems to be little interest in the idea.

Twitter profile of the wrongly banned Digg user, of whom you will be hearing more.

New profile of the former Digg user mentioned in a few bookmarks below, who was banned on what would appear to be unconscionably shaky grounds.

See somebody doing something creative with her blog on Stumbleupon. Do you find yourself wanting to slow down and take the time to really read, not just this blog, but the pages it links to, because you're having a good time? You get a real feeling of the presence of the other person on the other side of that screen, don't you?

Another blog at Stumbleupon, this one with more of an even more of an emphasis on photography, and one reviews of other stumbleblogs. Much more pleasant than just looking at a stack of links, wouldn't you agree? jjjunebug is caile-girl's mother. (See bookmark, immediately above)

Updates - if any more will ever be seen - on the progress of the service that many of Diigo's current users came from, after the January 30, 2009 data loss incident.

Development site for an open code release of the Ma.gnolia social bookmarking platform. Ma.gnolia is another bookmarking site that, prior to a well known crash of its system, planned to decentralise itself by encouraging the creation of a great many "little ma.gnolias" - satellite sites running ma.gnolia software, that would maintain a tie to the home site. The loss of all user data from the main site has set such plans back, but hasn't necessarily ended them altogether.

A blog that Zaibatsu (of former Digg user fame) contributes to, as one of the "hosts". No signs of multilevel marketing were present, as far as I could see. A fact that you can confirm for yourself, and I hope you will remember, as you read some of the remarks below.

Alex Laburu raises a serious point about Stumbleupon; that perverse incentives are built in to the system by SU's business model, in which the company makes money, not from visits to blogs on their system, but by getting paid for "stumbles" - random visits to sponsor websites taking place through their system. Under such a model, Laburu argues, a well written blog costs the company money, because it is a blog visitors are less likely to leave soon via a stumble - and those following its links aren't stumbling. He raises a good point (among others), one that should lead SU users to view with concern the supposedly good feature that is the absence of advertising on our blogs on SU, because it provides SU admins with a short term incentive to side with those misusing the system at the expense of those using it constructively. Which does leave us with the question of how Diigo is making its money, does it? One might ask if many of the users bring this sort of thing upon themselves - listen in on the screaming when the very possibility of introducing advertising is raised, on some sites, as if the hosting service didn't need to make money. Perhaps when the subject arises here - Diigo is still in Beta as I write this - some of us might want to speak in support of that very sensible source of revenue for a company we'd like to evolve in a healthier direction than that being taken by some of its competition, at the moment.

Post about the data loss incident at Ma.gnolia and what users of other services can do to reduce their risk

One of the few pieces of good news that came out of the Jan 30 mishap that swelled Diigo's ranks with former Ma.gnolia users was that many of the lost bookmarks were recoverable, especially if those users were using Friendfeed as well. I'm not generally a fan of that service, as it doesn't allow for comment screening, but one can set one's feed to "private", and a little extra insurance doesn't hurt. Let's hope that Diigo never suffers a similar incident, but just in case it does, being ready for it isn't a bad thing.