Railing against Digg and it’s kind is great sport but don’t get me wrong - I recognize the importance of those services in the context of a site such as this. Digg offers the promise of broad exposure and exposure means readership. Getting readership has taken us a few months, but we’re just now starting to regularly receive thoughtful comments from all over the place and that’s incredibly gratifying.

So to increase exposure NBEHTM and I decided to see to updating the site with a “Post to Digg” type feature such as we’ve seen elsewhere. Writing code from scratch can be fun but it’s generally time consuming. And this leads me to why I love open source. If you’ve ever wished you had a service or feature on your site, somebody else has probably already done something that’s at least similar and shared the code. Our “Post to Digg” feature was no exception.

In fact, the trouble for us wasn’t in finding code that somebody else had already written - it was in deciding between the wealth of options that were available. You’ll notice that there is a link at the bottom of each post now, a very subtle one. This is Share This, written by Alex King. We chose this Wordpress plugin because it is a very tastefully done option but there are certainly others.

Open source is the foundation for progress. While this site isn’t curing cancer or anything so noble as that, open source enabled us to avoid wasting time reimplementing features that had been produced elsewhere. Open source is doing this on a daily basis - providing solutions to common problems for people around the world. Effort can be focused in areas such as content creation or truly new feature development as a result of the benefits of open source.

So thanks to Alex King, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Guido Van Rossum and all the millions of others who are powering the Internet and making something truly remarkable available to the masses.

Update

Ankur of Digg This Reloaded, referred to above, points out that DTR now includes Share This.

Revolutions of all sorts tend to have unintended consequences - good and bad. Political revolutions can bring about regime change but also tend to usher along purges, repression and violence. The Industrial Revolution brought higher standards of living to the general population with the trade off of environmental degradation. Globalization has brought with it a raft of benefits in availability and cost of goods but has also contributing to abuses of power, people and political instability around the world. Home Depot has single-handedly spurred a home renovation boom while simultaneously dooming “mom and pop” hardware stores.

Progress happens. The negative unintended consequences of progress are the price to pay for the benefits we reap. Hindsight affords us a clarity of vision that allows for the convenient critique of actions that are past changing and gives us the false sense that the negative consequences of progress were ignored, or more conspiratorially, weren’t so unintended.

All that to say this: Digg.com and its ilk are leading us down a road to profoundly negative unintended consequences. I say this now so that in ten years, when my warnings weren’t heeded and the Internet is a smoking ruin, it won’t be such a surprise that this has happened (and I’ll be able to say I told you so).

Digg is to the Internet as Cosmopolitan is to the magazine industry - it is a channel for low value content to be fed to the masses. Digg is to the Internet as Walmart is to the retail industry - it is a channel for low worth content to be fed to the masses.

I’m taking a pretty hard line here, but I’m convinced that Digg sets a very dangerous benchmark. Note that I’m not saying that the idea of a social news site is bad - what I’m pointing out is that by being the mass-market publisher of the Internet, Digg is becoming what so many of us revile: a corporate behemoth, a controlling force, a hegemony that squeezes smaller and better offerings into the shadows.

And make no mistake - the Digg effect on the Internet will be the equivalent of Home Depot forcing smaller stores to close up shop. Small sites dealing in specialty content will find it harder and harder to increase readership because the content they produce won’t be mass-market friendly, thus no exposure on Digg. The inability of small sites to get their quality content onto the front page of Digg will mean that a large portion of the Internet population won’t be able to find real quality content (thanks also to Google in this case).

There is a way out of this. If social news is what the public wants, social news is what they should be given - but I’d like to suggest that social news site software needs to become a turn-key solution much like Wordpress is turn-key for blogging. This will lead to a profusion of social news sites with specialized focus and audiences and will blunt the power of Digg. Instead of relying on Digg’s over-generalized taxonomy of content, smaller offerings can become much more focused and specific, catering to knowledgeable communities of interest, relying on the discernment of those communities and ultimately raising the overall quality of the offerings.

In short, I’m suggesting that the software underpinnings of social news sites should be open-source and freely available. Open algorithms will allow for fine tuning, quality control and should help fighting “gaming”. Easy publishing will mean that catering to specific interests should require only the most basic skills, increasing accessibility.

Digg won’t go away in such an environment, but other and more focused resources will rise up to serve specific demographics that aren’t being well served now. Consider the following example as a demonstration of the benefit that could arise from what I am suggesting:

Aviation Week and Space Technology (AWST) is a magazine with a circulation of just over 100,000. It is sometimes referred to as “aviation leak” because it breaks so many stories in the aviation and space industries. It’s small readership comprises a generally affluent and knowledgeable demographic and so enables AWST to be profitable with prime advertisers and steady subscription rates. In this example AWST represents the specialized interests of a small and focused website.

Popular Mechanics boasts more than 10 times the readership of AWST. It covers aviation and pretty much everything else. The level of the coverage in the magazine is very shallow, leading to little real understanding of what is being discussed and requiring little competence from the reader. In this example, PM represents Digg.

Suffice it to say, I want to see more Aviation Week and less Popular Mechanics in our future. Do you?

I saw a blog post on the Digg “Technology” home page that interested me. The content raised flags with me so I wanted to check out the rest of the site to see what to make of it. What I found was… interesting. Take a look at the articles listing for yourself:

• Five reasons to build your own PC [ November 26, 2006 ]
• Eight reasons why Ubuntu is the Linux poster child [ November 26, 2006 ]
• How to avoid spyware [ November 25, 2006 ]
• Ten reasons why every programmer should learn C [ November 25, 2006 ]
• Why it is now the time to switch to Linux [ November 24, 2006 ]
• Six reasons why the Zune will fail [ November 24, 2006 ]

For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s known as “Digg bait.” The site Jubling.com apparently is producing content geared to satisfy the formulaic requirements known to be successful on social news sites and is promoted through Digg by the user Jubs. I’m not trying to make this a story about Jubs - he appears to be a reasonably good Digg citizen, digging various stories (though not commenting). I do the same thing from time to time - submit content from this site that I think might become popular - so I can’t very well make something out of that.

What this story is about is the type of content that manages to make it to the front page of Digg (There was not a single reference or citation in the Jubling story and the assertions that are made aren’t backed up). And since this is about the type of content that makes it to the front page of Digg, this is also about Digg. The Digg model seems to be failing us. Look critically at the content appearing on the front page of Digg and you’ll see more and more of these types of sites and stories - light in substance and quality.

What is the point of these sites? Traffic spikes can be very profitable to sites that run advertising. I estimate that the number of diggs a story gets only indicates 2%-5% of the total traffic that is sent to the site from Digg. A site with 1200 diggs, then could really be seeing between 24,000 and 60,000 hits. Including traffic from Reddit and any of the dozens of other sites, the burst of traffic could mean hundreds of dollars to the owner of the site.

With real profit potential in Digg it becomes tempting to post for the sake of Digg and not for the sake of content - and many aren’t above such temptation. I wouldn’t expect individuals to not take advantage of opportunities, especially since they appear to be working, but I will assert that Digg is fueling something that is counter to the interests of the users and the users are largely ignorant of what’s happening.

Is there better way? Slashdot is the site most commonly compared to Digg - it uses editorial processes to discriminate good content for the users and earned user trust. Perhaps Is there a hybrid model that takes some of the best of both models? I certainly hope so - for the sake of the Internet, we’ve got to be able to do better than Digg.

A hydrometer check today shows that my beer’s gravity is 17 today (Thursday), down from 20 on Tuesday. My final target is a gravity in the range of 8 to 12, so at this rate it might be next week before I’m ready to bottle.

Bottling a beer whose gravity isn’t sufficiently lowered can be very dangerous. Since gravity is largely a measure of how much sugar is still in the beer, bottling a beer with a high gravity (and adding additional sugar for carbonation) can mean that too much sugar makes it into the bottles. When the yeast begin to convert that sugar, and the sugar has nowhere to go, the pressure of the newly made carbon dioxide can get high enough to explode bottles. Exploding bottles are generally considered double-plus ungood.

Given that I’ve got at least four or five days to wait until the beer is ready to bottle, I’ve begun to consider involving a secondary fermenter in my brewing process (my impatience forces me to act!). The purpose of a secondary fermenter is discussed in my previous posts. To get a list of my other beer-related posts, click here.

Hard to tell, as the Internet is such an impersonal medium. NBEHTM’s voting for an even baker’s dozen - I think economies of scale do not apply so I’m estimating the number to be closer to six or so.

Anyway, server logs are cool. Looking through the logs on a lark today, I’ve been able to see traffic from all over the US as well as quite a few international visits. Welcome, hola, Gruss Gott, Villkommen and A Big Ol Howdy (for the Texans). Now, if somebody would start leaving some comments, we’d be a regular United Nations.

Wil Harris, a frequent TWiT, says that Leo is not giving up on TWiT. Rather, he’s simply expressing the thought that TWiT isn’t TWiT without at least a few of the originals like Dvorak or Patrick Norton. Lately it’s been hard to even get more than a couple people on at once, apparently.

Regardless, given the rumors that have been circulating that Leo Laporte would be canning TWiT for good, it made me reflect on whether I would be missing anything terribly important if TWiT went away -I had to pause for a moment when the answer I came back with was, “probably not.” TWiT is the most popular podcast (or netcast, according to Leo) on the Internet, so I’m probably in the minority here. Still, I see the possibility of a canceled TWiT more as an issue for other pod/netcasters more so than the listeners.

Leo Laporte, by virtue of his long experience in radio and television entertainment, brought savvy and production value to the medium, a medium that had previously been pretty weak in either. Leo also showed how listenership could be leveraged into a business model (surprisingly, it sounds a lot like radio).

Also, and probably most profoundly in the long term, Leo created a new “channel” of content with his TWiT network (including Inside the Net, FLOSS Weekly and others that I’ve enjoyed). So Leo’s been on the bleeding edge for the medium. But I think he’s also bringing to the medium expectations and requirements from sponsors.

Leo is pushing the medium in a pretty traditional direction, with traditional advertising and traditional and formulaic content creation. Granted, he’s in a league for this type of thing that I am not, and probably never will be, but pod/netcasting needs to have more than one or two spokespersons. Maybe TWiT going the way of the dodo wouldn’t be the worst thing for us - maybe it would lead to a little more innovation rather than transference of traditional forms to the new conduit.

It’s true! Mrs Ren has joined the growing family of Interested bloggers. We’re growing a pretty diverse collection of contributors here and I’m excited to see how this little experiment develops.

Once again, welcome to Mrs Ren and we’ll look forward to your first post!

Mrs Interested has heeded the call to blog and decided to join NBEHTM and me here. We know she’ll bring a fresh and interesting perspective to the goings on in the world and look forward to her making us look good. Once again, welcome!