In a prior post I came out in swinging defense of what I thought was Kevin’s courageous attempt to save Digg and Alexis’s misguided criticisms.
As it turns out, Digg V4 has decided to focus on ‘large publishers’ (like Alexis had thought they would) rather than ‘small publishers’ (whichh I thought they were).
So, given that I quickly (and loudly) appealed to Alexis to be cautious with his critique, I feel it is appropriate to (just as loudly) apologize and admit that I was wrong, and am now disappointed in Digg and Kevin.
I stand corrected Alexis, you were right.
Please note that I am not apologizing just because the community revolted – communities always revolt when change happens, but they often get used to it – but I am acknowledging that Alexis correctly saw what the true changes at Digg were, as I did not.
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I recently had a need for video compression software. I was working on a side project, that involved compressing video and releasing it online.
I tried many different pieces of freeware and they all came up short. They were either too complicated, or didn’t quite do a good job. I settled on Sorenson Squeeze 6. I have had experience with one of the earlier versions and remember it being pretty nice to use and the results were pretty good (i.e. relatively small size for high quality video). Continue reading
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Say it ain’t so? As far as I know, I was never told that Blizzard would be using my bandwidth to serve other clients. I hope I didn’t miss it in the long EULA I skimmed over and agreed to.
As you can see in the image above, I am downloading Starcraft 2 Beta from a number of ‘peers’. I have a unique Peer ID (blacked out for privacy purposes), and each of my peers have the same. The leftmost column is the IP address for all the clients I am connected to, and the rightmost column is their Peer ID. Continue reading
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Google just announced that they have rolled out a new indexing system for their search engine, called Caffeine.
Here are some interesting quotes:
Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here’s a good explanation of how it all works.)
What’s even more intriguing is the amount of data they process:
Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.
I can’t even fathom that amount of data.
To read the official Google announcement, check it out here.
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I can see how on the surface these changes look like a clone of other more popular features, but I suspect you might be mis-interpreting what’s happening here.
Yes, many of the features look and feel like competitors. But so does the iPod. It plays mp3s? Yuck! So does Rhapsody’s player, why would I want one from Apple. So does a Mercedes/BMW, it has wheels + an engine.
The issue is the way it does what it does. I have not used it just yet, but from what I have seen, this could fundamentally be as much of a game changer as the first version of digg was to giving individual publishers a bigger voice.
Imagine…now, as a publisher, I have 200 ‘followers’ whose sole interest is in seeing the links/stories that I publish. Jason Fried talks about buildingan audience. So far, there is no other tool that ‘aggregates’ all your content and pushes it directly to an audience like digg v4 is suggested to do.
People use Twitter to do this, but it wasn’t built to do that. It was built for messages of 140 characters. Valuable in it’s own right, but not as a ‘media publishing’ tool.
People use status updates on Facebook to do that, but it wasn’t made for that. It was made to update friends on your latest activities (i.e. uploaded new videos/photos, add new quotes, friended new people, got engaged/married….other things that your social graph might find of value).
But for publishers trying to build an audience, there isn’t one tool that allows an audience to ‘subscribe’ to everything of interest to them.Yes, you can have a blog with an RSS feed. Your twitter feed has an RSS feed, etc. But RSS feed readers suck!
The mere fact that I can have one place, that streamlines all of the links published by people I am interested in hearing from + links they found interesting, is absolutely game-changing (in my opinion).Ofcourse, it all comes down execution, but based on what I am seeing, I think I see Kevin back in his original form. Quite contrary to your assertion about pandering to his VCs, I don’t see any evidence of driving revenues. I see mainly product development. I see small UI elements that seem to enhance the link discovery process. I see giving value to small-time publishers and further ‘democratization’ of news.
Maybe I am biased, because I am one of those that submit stories that stall or get a handful of diggs. This looks like it could be a significant game changer for me. Maybe it won’t guarantee all my stories will make it to the front page, but I would not be surprised if my content got easily 200% – 800% more traffic, as a direct result of this change.
THAT…would be game changing.
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Concept: Give consumers free stuff (on a very consistent basis) and give advertisers more brand engagement. Think woot.com but with free, quality, stuff (or actually even deeply discounted – per the coupon in the win).
