Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo!
Kevin Rose is on stage talking about what Digg knows. He says they have 600k
editors that digg stories. Yesterday they set a record for fastest story to hit
digg frontpage – the Rumsfeld resignation story took just 4 minutes to hit the homepage after it was submitted! He said netscape and
reddit also got the story on their frontpages before mainstream media. 33% of
diggs for popular stories typically come via Swarm or Stack.
Kevin said that they’ll be launching a custom flash toollit for publishers
soon, for them to skin their own interface for swarm/stack. He shows a very cute (but Kevin called it a bit lame) example of bees pollinating (=digging) flowers (=stories), so the flowers will grow over time.
Kevin now addresses the issue of gaming. He says they have 1 sitewide
administrator, so they have to create the tools behind the scenes for that
person plus the community to help prevent gaming. He says they gave the power to
the community to prevent the spamming, but they wanted to go one step deeper. So
they take a look at digg patterns – trying to pick up “unhealthy
patterns”. So they look at referrers, ip addresses etc – if for example 90%
no referrals for a story, the know it’s spam. Another thing they look for is
same-source digging – always digging the same source. Also high % of anon
proxies.
Kevin ends by saying they have around 20 new features coming next month.
