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I’ve been visiting Digg.com for a long time, and recently I’ve noticed that the volume of diggs for frontpage stories seems to have dropped.  The last few months it has just seemed to me that there are a lot of stories on the homepage that have 200-300 diggs, where six months or a year ago I remember the vast majority of homepage stories having 500+ votes.  So I decided to take a look.

Digg’s homepage includes a featured called “Top in All Topics,” which lists the ten most popular stories on the site, presumably for the last twenty four hours (it doesn’t say).   Using the Wayback Machine, I went back and looked at how many diggs the top stories got on random days in the past compared to today.  The chart below shows the range.

From my reading, this shows that the number of diggs for the very top story on Digg has remained fairly consistent the last two years, with the occasional blockbuster breaking the 5,000+ digg barrier.  However, as you’ll see the number of votes for the fifth and tenth most popular stories on the site are much lower than in the past. 

• The average fifth place story for the days I looked at in 2007 and 2008 averaged 1,444 diggs.  Today’s fifth most popular story has 833 diggs.
• The average tenth place story in 2007 and 2008 averaged 954 diggs.  Today’s fifth most popular story has 571 diggs.

While my quick study is certainly unscientific and there could be an explanation that I’m missing, I think these findings are a pretty good indication that people aren’t digging as many stories as they did in the past.  A drop in digging activity would be a pretty clear sign that the service is losing some traction. 

As to why, my guess would be Twitter. 

I personally have been using Digg  less the last six months as Twitter has become my primary method for discovering new content.  I suspect others are spending less time on Digg as well.

In addition, on many of the blogs and websites I work on (including this one) we’ve removed the “digg this” button we had traditionally used and replaced it with a retweet button.  In the past three years, our blog has been on the homepage of Digg twice.  Both times we got on the homepage due to a prominent Digg user finding our story – not because of our “digg this” button.  So we gave up, and decided to focus on the retweet button instead since we weren’t getting much of a return from the Digg button.  I suspect other designers are making similar decisions.

Do you buy my theory?

I’m definitely late to this party, but yesterday Twitter launched a new design for its homepage.  This is the version of the homepage users who are not logged in and who are visiting the site for the first time will see.

Lots of smart people have already surrounded this topic, so I won’t write a long drawn out post about it, but I did want to share a few quick thoughts.

To state the obvious, the new site emphasizes search and trend tracking, and de-emphasizes orienting users new to the service and Twitter’s social components.  It looks like the homepage for a search engine.  This strikes me as a mistake.  While I certainly use Twitter trends and search, the main reason I use Twitter is for the community of people I follow and who follow me. This aspect of the service gets lost with this homepage. Perhaps more importantly, the new page doesn’t do a good job of explaining what Twitter is – it assumes you already know.

In addition, the heavy highlighting of trends on the homepage will further encourage people to spam Twitter, or, more legitimately, to manufacture memes so that they appear on this main page.  The obsession people have with becoming a trending topic will increase dramatically I would think.  I’m not sure this is a positive development for Twitter.

What do you think?

A shiny new NPR.org revealed itself Monday with a simpler homepage design packed with multimedia features and customizable choices.

Like most major media websites still afloat, NPR.org aims to keep radio content its core but offer up multi-platform, all-purpose news.

The new site is a major improvement to its tightly-fonted, cramped and confusing predecessor. Now, homepage focuses on news, arts and the latest audio clips from the organization’s most popular shows.

National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller sat down with Newsweek to discuss the site’s re-launch and strategic steps for online media. Schiller, who was senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com just six months ago, has a unique perspective from the top of an industry struggling to survive.

One classic battle playing out in newsrooms and online offices across the country is the delicate balance of the traditional company and its online additions. Schiller says the relationship between the online newsroom and radio producers and reporters is symbiotic.

“In creating all this digital content, it’s not just to service NPR.org,” she said. “We’re giving them more digital content that they can pull down and use on their site.”

As a national public broadcasting institution, however, NPR is faced with a different set of challenges than private media groups in blending local public content with national news. Schiller feels local news stations are the ones suffering the most in the economic downturn, and says NPR.org is attempting to dissuade that trend.

“One of the major focuses of our digital initiative is to give stations the tools, the resources, the knowledge, and the infrastructure, so they can create a great experience in their communities,” she told Newsweek.

Local content, however, proves to be buried in national headlines and difficult to access on the new site, however. The site promotes its many blogs and includes local news in a few select places when relevant, but a strong push for promoting local content is a bit lost.

The new site may draw in new audiences, but its shift to multiplatform production indicates a core change in NPR’s business model that may be a tall order for an organization with such a strong production tradition.

A few days ago (on a cloudy day, when I began writing this post), I received my Jolicloud private alpha 2b developer version invite. After creating a Jolicloud account and downloading a 600MB .img file, I copied it over as a bootable USB thumb drive and was off to the races. Loading it was hassle-free — Jolicloud is based off of Ubuntu; the install process is nearly identical.

On my Asus Eee PC 901, I have a fast 4GB solid state drive, and a slower 8 GB solid state drive. I decided to manually partition my drives, mounting root (/) on the 4GB and my home directory (/home) on the 8GB. Since I have 2 GB of RAM, and all storage in the 901 is solid state, I decided that a swap partition wasn't necessary or ideal in my scenario.

On my 901, it takes 31.6 seconds to boot from power button to log-in prompt. Fairly impressive for the underpowered hardware, but I was honestly expecting it to be quicker. It appears to boot slightly faster than my previous install of Gentoo (and is certainly less hassle to configure), but I neglected to time this before installing Jolicloud. We'll just have to resort to my concept of time and space on this one. Keep reading after the break to see my first impressions on this much-hyped OS.

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Twitter 101 – A Guide to Twitter for Businesses

Per Techcrunch, Twitter just launched Twitter 101, which is a starters kit for businesses interested in using the service to promote their company/products.  Check out the guide here.

Click fraud, an internet crime perpetrated by people, automated systems and programs clicking on links and ads to increase investor appeal and ad revenue, continues to be complicated to police, and a report released Thursday by Anchor Intelligence shows Vietnam as a hotbed for online scammer activity.

“Nearly half of all the advertising clicks coming from Vietnam are composed of fraudulent traffic aimed at inflating online publishers’ advertising revenue, according to an analysis of billions of clicks a month on its clients’ advertising networks,” Forbes reported.

Canada and the United States rank second and third, both with slightly more than 25 percent of clicks coming from illegitimate sources.

Vietnam’s economy has seen a swell of online business revenue over the past few years. Anchor Intelligence Vice President for Products, believes the growing online population combined with the lack of stringent security and monitoring make Vietnam an easy target for fraud cultivation.

"Vietnam has a lot of PCs and Internet service providers with outdated software and other vulnerabilities," Sims said, according to Forbes. "It’s likely that users running Windows 98 on their machine have been infected with malware so that while they might be sleeping, their machines are still engaging in click fraud."

For a small country, Vietnam ranks sixth on the list of countries by click volume, Tech Crunch reported, indicating the rise in Vietnamese online business is not adequate to account for its click activity.

Major companies such as Microsoft and Facebook have launched major lawsuits battling click fraud, and while the trend is still on an overall upward trajectory, reports for June indicated a small drop in the incidence of click fraud since May.

Like many others, I occasionally use Compete and Alexa data to compare traffic of websites whose logs I don’t have access to.  I know these services are imperfect, but a comparison I ran today of NYTimes.com vs. USAToday.com vs. WashingtonPost.com shows just how anecdotal the data from these services is.

Below are the results of a comparison of the three sites from Compete for the last year.  According to Compete, USA Today gets more unique visitors than the New York Times.  My gut tells me this is completely wrong.  While I’ve read my share of issues of USA Today on airplanes and at hotels, it is unfathomable to me that its website is more popular than NYTimes.com.

So I went over to Alexa and did a similar comparison to dramatically different results.  The New York Times is well ahead of both the Post and USA Today in terms of Daily Reach, with USA Today actually trailing the Post by a small margin. To put this in perspective, Compete is reporting that USA Today gets around twice the traffic as Alexa is reporting.  So this discrepancy isn’t within any normally accepted margin of error.

To me, the Alexa result feels rights, and a look at the Nielsen data makes me semi confident that my gut instinct is more correct than Compete.  However, the Nielsen data routinely comes under criticism itself, as does that of competing service Comscore.

The fact of the matter is that the only way to track site usage with any precision is through log files, which the firms providing these numbers don’t have access to.  No one has truly figured out to track overall web usage accurately as of yet, so we should all remember to take these numbers with a huge grain of salt.  Even when the the stats you get back match your working hypothesis, as the Alexa numbers do in my USA Today vs. NYTimes vs. WashingtonPost.com comparison.

NPR will be launching a redesigned website on Monday, and they are providing a sneak preview of the homepage of the new site via a YouTube video. While the video only provides a brief glimpse of the new site, what is shown looks quite impressive. I look forward to taking a look on Monday.