Yesterday Digg announced that Matt Williams, currently an executive at Amazon, will be joining at CEO in September. From Kevin’s post:
“Matt has spent the past 11 years in a variety of roles at Amazon, most recently as GM for Consumer Payments, and earlier in his career he led Amazon’s community efforts. He was the Founder and CEO of LiveBid.com, which was acquired by Amazon in May of 1999. Matt brings seasoned management experience and has a reputation for delivering innovative products and excellent results.”
“The majority of Digg’s userbase will likely find the new design refreshing and it very well may gain some traction among users that feel overwhelmed with the real-time news stream or the pontifications in their news feed. Better yet, Digg may attract a whole new audience looking for a place to discover news through curated sources.”
With the new Digg rumored to be launching this week, and further rumors that it will allow users to import their social graphs from Facebook, Twitter and others in order to create a personalized My News experience, I’m hoping next year’s Social Media Map won’t represent Digg as that lonely island just north of the United Territories of Wikimedia.
We just launched a feature that allows alpha testers of the new Digg (version 4) to invite friends. I’ve got a few left. Want one? Drop me a note at chas [at] digg [dot] com.
My favorite thing about the new Digg is My News, the default start page that ranks content items not by their overall Digg count (that’s still there, called Top News) — but by the Digg count among people (or publishers or brands) I’ve opted to follow. That’s the number in the green box below. (By “opted to follow,” I mean I clicked the button that pulls in my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pals, but you can also add new tastemakers by clicking on Find Profiles.)
Digg, the Grammys, NOTCOT and others got together in LA last week to talk about social news, crowdsourced content discovery and more. About six and half minutes into the above video, I give my 90-second version of the changes coming to Digg as part of Version 4.
Digg user dankoleary created this video tour of the new Digg. He’s liking My News, the feature that sorts stories based on friends’ activity, and he’s loving the clean design and lightening-fast load times.
On Friday I interviewed one of the young men featured in these ads I saw in Facebook:
It’s a common practice for companies to run job postings on Craigslist or LinkedIn, but this is the first time I’ve seen prospective employees taking out ads to announce their interest in working for me. Tough times call for innovative tactics, I guess.
Innovative but not expensive. The candidate I spoke to told me he used Facebook’s self-service ad-buying tool to target the pages of Facebook users who are members of the Digg network, and he agreed to pay about $0.50 any time someone clicked on the ad, which linked to his resume. Given that Digg has fewer than 100 employees (you can only join the Digg network if you’re a current or past employee), not all of whom are members of the Digg network on Facebook, and only a subset of the members clicked on the ad, the job-seeker spent less than $20 to get himself a job interview at the next company he wants to work for.
If you’ve got 17 minutes, and you’re interested in why Facebook is “defaulting to social” (despite the PR hoopla) and why Google’s PageRank algorithm is about to face stiff competition from Facebook’s Like signal, watch this video from the start.
If you’re a short-attention-span ad wonk, skip forward 13 minutes and 30 seconds — to where Kevin predicts syndicated Twitter ads that are targeted based on “interest graphs,” and a future where you no longer hate ads.
Digg and the Social Media Group teamed up on a whitepaper that analyzes performance data from DiggAds campaigns over the past 8 months, and offers 5 tips to improve campaign performance. From the introduction:
“In 2005, Digg launched with a mission to let readers curate content by voting (or “Digging”) stories they think others should read — an online newspaper of sorts where readers, not editors, determine the stories that appear on the front page. Members of the Digg community submit quality content they find on professional publications like CNN.com, independent publications and blogs like TechCrunch, video sites like YouTube, or even commercial websites such as Toyota.com or IBM.com. Other readers review these submissions and vote the best-of-the-best to the homepage. In other words, Digg readers care about the quality, relevance and timeliness of content, not whether the publisher is a publicly-traded media company, a Fortune 500 consumer electronics manufacturer, or an independent photographer posting pictures to her blog.
“Understanding that Digg readers are willing to engage with quality, branded content led to the development of new social ad products on Digg. These ads allow brands to promote their own content, provided they’re willing to let the community Digg them up (or bury them down), just like other content submitted to Digg. DiggAds, as they’re called, are a simple idea. Consumers today trust their peers over brands when it comes to credible content. If brands want their content to be considered more credible (and therefore be consumed), there is an emerging opportunity to let those same consumers curate their messages, too.”
