The NY Times on Digg

Digg needs a new PR person, badly. While boycotts against systems in place opens the door to smaller sites, what ever is going on over at Digg has caught the attention of the NY Times, and it is not all that happy go lucky. Digg is the daddy of the whole plug the news and vote on it, but something is definitely wrong in Digg Town.

Both LifeHacker and Gizmodo have put up an official policy that no one affiliated with the sites will Digg their own stuff. What is interesting is that the Editor in Chief of Gizmodo was quoted in the NY Times saying

Brian Lam, editor in chief of Gizmodo, said in an e-mail that he found it “unethical” to push anything to Digg that’s “not our stuff in the first place.” “We have enough readers to swing things a bit in our favor,” he added. Source: The Ledge Blog NY Times

That meets with the general idea that people point to the original article that they used, but unless you are a Slashdot format type of web site, there is usually original content wrapped around the links to other sites. It is near impossible to write anything without showing one outside link that sparked the original idea, or a source for further information.

In the mean time, Both Life hacker and Gizmodo have the same policy with different shout outs to people (nice publicity) asking folks not to link to the article on Lifehacker or Gizmodo unless it has original content. This is good, and while this article will have about seven out links when done, most of this is original content except the quotes that make this work.

In the mean time some folks are not happy and think this is all about Political Correctness.

This is the part that Techwag does not get; we have the data that we compiled on the effectiveness of the various social sites right here. We know that their value tapers off over time, and that people who post from a single blog will usually see their stories buried. At first, the social networks like Digg were a great way to build initial traffic, but now that Digg is tapering off for us, Google and the other search engines start stepping in.

This is where the long tail and page rank starts working in favor of the blog. This is the part that everyone who studies the use of social networks seems to forget. Attention spans are low, Digg et al are only good for a short period of time, say 30-40 days, by then the search engines are kicking in, and while you will have a month of slower traffic (this is the pattern we are seeing to date), it does start to pick up.

The value of the Digg button and the value of throwing any content on Digg or other social networks tapers off over time. Even if it is blog spam, and trust us, we are familiar with it, our own stuff is copied and thrown over the wall with no back links or attribution, we also know that there is not much about this we can do.

This is a lot of hype, here we take a stand because we can, 10 points for making a good decision that suits the company. However, as the comments on life hacker point out, Digg is already in trouble, we love them because they will take a stand, but all the while, they are considered untrustworthy, and that is fatal to any company.