USocial CEO: 'We're gaming Digg' [Updated]

USocial is gaming popular social bookmarking sites, including Digg. Credit: uSocial

Among Digg's and StumbleUpon's tens of millions of users, the social bookmarking sites have successfully dealt with numerous troublemakers who try to "game" the voting systems. But one company may be putting the entire organic voting approach in jeopardy.

USocial lets advertisers buy votes on popular social bookmarking sites to catapult their links to sections of Digg, StumbleUpon or AOL's Propeller services that get the most visibility.

In Digg's case, a submission that receives enough votes from its users (or with a little help from uSocial's dozen employees) will reach the coveted front page, which can drive tens of thousands of visitors in a matter of hours.

It's no wonder that a handful of organizations -- including a Darfur foundation, the U.S. Marines, the Mormon Church and ...

Social Status: Reddit top user 'qgyh2' sits on the hot seat

Last summer, our Web Scout blog profiled a Reddit user who goes by the name 'qgyh2.' He's the top user on the social news website, which gives him a lot of power over what appears there. Now the mysterious Midland, Mich., maven, who scours the Web for interesting news bits, is finding himself the subject of news on his hangout and on its rival, Digg.

The Digg post "You think Digg has a Power User problem?" hit the site's front page a few days ago, amassing more than 3,200 votes. The post highlights a screen shot showing that qgyh2 had submitted 10 of the top 18 links in the "environment" category.

Qgyh2 is the author of the "environment" category (also known as a sub-reddit). That grants him the ability to moderate submissions. Some users, like the ones in this thread, are upset with the way he monitors for spam. But qgyh2 said in an e-mail that much of the junk is now filtered automatically.

The "environment" sub-reddit doesn't get much traffic, which could explain why one user has such dominance over its top submissions. Also, it's one of qgyh2's favorite haunts. "It is one of a handful of reddits I typically submit to," he said.

Reddit user Illah says dominance by individuals isn't much of a problem on the website. " 'Environment' is a niche reddit with a limited audience," he wrote in the thread. "Most stories have single-digit vote counts."

But all the attention given to Reddit's top-user "problem" doesn't seem to have taken the pressure off Digg's top dog.

Andrew Sorcini, a 40-year-old film editor from Los Angeles who goes by the alias MrBabyMan on Digg, gets plenty of flack for his widespread influence on the website. Users accuse him of duplicating their story submissions (an act they equate with stealing); his more popular reputation lets him elevate stories to the front page, leaving the submissions of less-powerful Diggers to languish even if they discovered an interesting item first.

"I think it's a natural artifact of being successful," Sorcini wrote in an instant message. "The best advice I've been given is to consider flamers [a nickname for excitable people on the Net] as Web terrorists. To address their abuse is to legitimize them, so the best course of action is to ignore them."

In the end, these top users don't seem to be gaining anything besides Internet celebrity. They haven't yet found a way to cash in on their successes.

"I'm just submitting stuff I like," Sorcini wrote. "My wife, on the other hand, wishes there was some way to monetize my ability!"

-- Mark Milian

Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson on Digg 'throttling back,' power users and dupe detection*

Rose and Adelson at the L.A. DiggNation meetup. (Photo: David Sarno)

Digg just announced today that given the current economic climate, it's going to be chilling out on growth plans, and maybe even reducing staff. I caught up with Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson last week at the L.A. Diggnation meetup, and asked them about the state of the San Francisco company, features in the works, the power-user problem and their take on the media landscape.

What’s been happening since the $28 million funding round last September?

Adelson: The world changed a little bit. A little bit of an economic shift. We're looking at 2009 and 2010 as riskier years from the advertising world and so on, just like everyone else does. We originally said we were going to double our staff in 2009 and go international. We’ve definitely pulled the throttle back on a lot of that. So we’re focusing hard on getting to profitability as fast as possible so that that question is over with.

Rose: We still want to be the best social news site on the Web. That means continuing to evolve what we already have, taking feedback from the users and blending in some new features that we haven’t talked about yet.

So are you still going to move to a new headquarters?

Adelson: No, we’re not moving the company. We’re going to stay right where we are on Potrero Hill. We’re not going to double the staff -- well, we may eventually, but not right now. The idea is to be conservative about our spending like everyone else and make sure we’re as efficient as possible, but not to slow down our engineering or ability to roll out these new features.

What Digg features from 2008 are you happiest with?

Rose: The recommendation engine is the big one. We realized a long time ago that there were so many new stories per day that it was impossible for any one user to go through all those. When we first launched the site there were maybe 3-, 4-, 500,000 stories. We had some hard-core Diggers that would go through them all and find the best. And then as we grew larger people would rely on their friends networks. But soon we realized we needed a better way to comb through all the stories and present users with relevant information....

Adelson: Don’t wait for them. Be proactive and push it to them.

Rose: Exactly.

Are people using it?

Rose: Yes, Digging in the Upcoming section is up 500% since we rolled out recommendations.

What’s been going on behind the scenes?

Adelson: One of the things we did that no one really sees is that we rewrote 65- to 70% of the code base while the jet was flying, and no one really noticed.

Rose: It’s always been a challenge for us to scale the site. Getting up to 34 million unique visitors, where we are now -- staying ahead of that growth takes a whole set of engineers working on that nonstop. Finally we have an infrastructure that we can scale. That’ll let us do all these crazy geeky things like sharding that'll allow us to scale for quite a long time.

Adelson: I think it’s a big misconception about Digg that...

Inauguration Day prompts rush of social media, telecom prep

Some of the estimated 215,000 people who filled the Tiergarten park in Berlin to hear Barack Obama speak last July. Expect an even larger crowd at the inauguration. Credit: Associated Press

Heading to Washington, D.C., for Tuesday's presidential inauguration? Yeah, you and an estimated 2 million others. Good luck making a cellphone call.

Partygoers should have no shortage of things to do on Inauguration Day, but they may have trouble getting in touch with one another that day to organize. When so many people crowd into such a small area, the cellular tubes tend to get clogged.

The two largest wireless carriers say they're ready. Both AT&T and Verizon Wireless have extended their networks in the nation's capital, deploying portable cell sites (trucks that serve cellphone transmissions) throughout the city.

AT&T spent $4 million to beef up its coverage in the District of Columbia, focusing on 2G and 3G (second- and third-generation) data networks, said Debbie Lieberman, an AT&T spokeswoman. And Verizon Wireless has spent more than $1 billion since 2000 to increase capacity in the city, including adding coverage in the Metro subway system, said John Johnson, a Verizon Wireless spokesman.

Still, there's no guarantee that every call will go through.

"Any network is like a giant highway system," Johnson said. "We've added thousands and thousands of new lanes for the inauguration. But millions and millions of cars can still cause a traffic jam if they try to move in the same place at the same time."

The CTIA Wireless Assn., a trade group, issued some tips. The list advises you to save photos or videos to transmit them to friends later -- so as not to bog down the cell networks -- and have a backup meeting spot in case calls don't go through.

The most crucial tip, though, is to send text messages instead of call.

"In these big events, voice networks often go down because so many people make so many phone calls. But SMS gets through," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, referring to the short message service protocol used for text messages.

Twitter may prove to be the ideal ...

LeVar Burton sings 'Reading Rainbow' at Digg event

LeVar Burton, newly on the social media scene, made a surprise visit to the Los Angeles DiggNation taping Wednesday night, stealing the stage from hosts Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose to do a few lines of the "Reading Rainbow" theme song, one of the best loved children's television ditties of all time. And if you think I'm exaggerating, just ask the crowd.  Hi, LeVar!

— David Sarno

Facebook Connect makes sense if you're ready for it

"Only connect!"

From the announcements that came out today, it seems Facebook and Google are taking the famous advice of Margaret Schlegel, the main character of E.M. Forster's "Howard's End."  The phrase, originally an appeal to get in touch with one's inner passions, also seems like an apt marketing maxim for the new superaccount features that big sites are hawking now. 

Today Facebook formally launched its Facebook Connect feature, which lets the social network's users easily log in to a limited but varied array of sites -- including Digg, CNN, CNET and HowCast -- using their Facebook credentials.  Once you've done so, a sort of channel is opened between your Facebook account and the extra-Facebookian site.  So for instance, if you log in to CitySearch and write a review of your new favorite Chinese restaurant, the review is also published to your profile so friends can see it -- so now instead of just strangers seeing your review, the people you know can get your thoughts too. 

Although not all of the sites have friendly interfaces yet, you can imagine similar activity echoing from all kinds of sites -- news, culture, shopping, hobbies, online video -- the ultimate idea being that instead of just getting status updates and seeing your new photos, friends will be able to more closely track what you're doing online, and you'll be able to see what they're doing too.  It's becoming pretty clear that using your friends' preferences as a way to cut through the Web's info glut is a winning idea.   Odds are you're more likely to share their interests more than you would those of a random cross-section of the population.

At first, the idea of having all your activities monitored and beamed to your friends can feel a bit invasive -- and Facebook got creamed for a similar idea last year. But before you run screaming for the bunker, remember that there are thousands of sites that have been tracking our online behavior for years...

Photographers find unwitting success with social media

A photo of mountain goats scaling a cliff, featured on Roger Eickholt's Flickr page, was all the rage on Monday. It was plastered on social media sites and around the blogosphere, driving more than 200,000 people to view it.

But nobody told Eickholt, who snapped the photo.

It wasn't until after he received my e-mail, requesting an interview a few days after the photo's popularity had run its course, that the 28-year-old amateur photographer from Alberta, Canada, checked his Flickr account to find his new audience. Eickholt says more than a hundred people added him to their lists of favorite Flickr users, meaning they'll be notified every time he posts a new photo. Before this week, he had two.

When Eickholt analyzed Flickr's link referral page to make sense of his newfound prominence, Reddit.com topped the list. What is Reddit, you ask? "This website talks about current events and stuff like that, I guess," said Eickholt. "I have no idea. I've never really been to those websites before."

Reddit, like all social media websites, is serendipitous. Few know what type of photograph, video or news bit is going to explode, and what's going to fizzle. And often times, content creators aren't the ones who ...

Web of love: looking for romance online

In the flower-power era of the 1960s, John Lennon emphatically sang, "All you need is love." But he didn't have to worry about the Internet, and having to text message sweet nothings to Yoko. Some techies are finding the courting process difficult, and they're turning to more unusual, high-tech means to seek potential mates. (No, we're not talking about racy Craigslist ads.)

Take, for example, the anonymous 25-year-old man who's, well, uninitiated in the ways of love. His website, Help a Virgin, has gotten significant attention over the last couple of days. The deal, assuming it's not all a hoax: His girlfriend (that is, a friend who is a girl -- a relationship that has been, so far, totally platonic) agreed to do him a favor by alleviating his carnal deficiency as long as the website receives 5 million hits by New Year's Eve. If he doesn't reach his goal, he'll have to do "anything she wants for a whole month."

Thanks to some attention from Reddit, the social news website, Help a Virgin has seen a major surge in Web traffic. The site has been up since at least the summer (the last time it was updated was July), but after it hit Reddit's front page on Sunday, the traffic counter has more than doubled -- to 80,000 and rising. At this rate, his scheme won't succeed (he wouldn't even get half the target number) so he'll definitely need some additional attention. (He didn't respond to my e-mail requests for an interview, but, then again, I'm not a woman.)

He wouldn't be the first to chalk up a failed attempt at Internet-assisted intimacy. Cargo8, a user of the popular social news site Digg, made his plea for a prom date earlier this year. The post includes a photo of him holding poster boards with his proposal written on them. Diggers supported him, giving more than 14,000 votes to the post, but his love interest didn't reciprocate. Ouch.

Internet proposals don't always end in heartbreak, however. Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google software engineer, popped the question using the Google Maps' panoramic Street View feature. In the street-level photos, he can be seen standing in front of the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., holding a sign that reads "Marry Me Leslie." She said yes. But, to be fair, he did ask her beforehand, the old-fashioned way -- in person, during a quiet night at home, engagement ring and all.

"The assurance this guy got pre-Digg is not as cool for the risk factor though," Cargo8 wrote on Weiss-Malik's Digg post.

At least he got the girl, buddy.

-- Mark Milian

Screenshot of Help a Virgin

Anti-religion agenda among social media users

Andrew Barker embodies the average Digg user: a white male in his 20s, tech savvy, with a sense of humor that often pushes boundaries into the taboo. You can find him browsing the social news website a couple times a day, but you won't see him at a church, synagogue or mosque.

The 27-year-old from Mishawaka, Ind., abandoned organized religion long ago and now describes himself as agnostic. For him, time spent in the house of Digg is not unlike a Sunday church gathering. Groups of like-minded individuals share gossip and stories, and they discuss such topics as politics, sports and, yes, even religion.

But you won't find many links to Bible studies on the front page of Digg -- unless it's about the absurdity of taking Scripture literally. A 2-year-old survey of Digg users showed a significant concentration of atheists and agnostics. Because Digg's content is submitted and voted on by the users, the stories promoted to the website's homepage reflect the audience.

Although Barker reads Digg regularly, he doesn't submit links very often. But he had a big hit with a picture he posted of a child's coloring book showing Jesus riding a dinosaur. "I found it, and thought, 'God, that's such a hilarious image,'" Barker said. "Digg takes everything religious so lightheartedly."

Poking fun at evangelical Christians, Catholics, creationists, the image of Jesus Christ and, well, anything remotely associated with religion is ...