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As all great things in life, Digg has recently lost a bit of it’s luster in my eyes. Sure it’s fun to read about people in positions of power saying incredibly stupid things, or look at crazy or funny pictures. It’s a good time reading about all the latest Apple news, and the coolest futuristic gadgets, but it was slowly becoming clear to me that it was missing something. And then, last night as I sat sipping my drink by the soft glow of my MacBook, it dawned on me… Digg needed a Drinking Game!

Of course, coming up with one didn’t take me long and I’m probably not the first to come up with such a wonderful idea but I’ll lay down the rules I came up with and we can all go from there. So without further ado, I give you the first edition of the

The Digg Drinking Game Rules

Preparation: Gather ’round a few friends (you only have a problem if you’re drinking alone right?), plenty of alcohol, and point your favorite browser to Digg Spy. Then decide amongst your group what level of drinking you’d like to participate in this evening (or afternoon or morning… hey it’s 5 o’clock somewhere). Currently there are three levels: Lightweight, Impaired, and Raging Alcoholic.

Playing the Game: Once you’ve chosen your level, each participant must pick one of the following phrases. When a story with the phrase you picked is Dugg or Buried, you have to drink. Each phrase also has a “bonus” that requires extra action. Enjoy! (responsibly of course)

Lightweight - for all you 100lb girls and guys that drink like them

• A story with the word “Rumor” in the title is dugg.
• A story from cnet.com/news.com/com.com is dugg. (This one might have to be moved up into the next level. I’ll leave it up to you.)
• A story with a typo in the title is dugg. (This of course has the built in safety valve of the more you drink, the less you’ll be able to spot the typos.)
• A story with “Kevin Rose” in the title is dugg. (Drink twice if they use his last name in an oh so clever play on words.)
• A story from the Health section is dugg. (Simply for the irony factor.)

Impaired - remembe we’re kicking it up a notch

• A story with the description of “Title says it all” is dugg OR buried. (Drink twice if they then proceed to explain the story anyway.)
• A story about Hillary or Obama is dugg or buried. (Drink twice if mentions them both.)
• A story with the 10 in the title or description is dugg – 10 reasons why, top 10 myths, 10 Most Amazing, etc. etc. (David Letterman would be so proud.)
• Someone leaves a “Am I the only one who thought this was about” or “Am I the only one that read this as” comment. (I realize this will require you to actually scroll around through Digg rather than just watching Spy but if you’re in the Impaired division, you should be dedicated enough to drinking to make this one work.)
• A “How To” story is dugg or buried. (Drink twice if it’s followed by some absurd/impossible task. “How to fly a pig to the moon” for example.)

Raging Alcoholic – you may want to have bail money ready

• A negative story about Bush is dugg, or a positive story about W is buried. (Drink twice if the opposite happens – a positive story about Bush is dugg or a negative one is buried. You should be fairly safe on this one.)
• A story with Digg in the title or description is dugg. (Drink twice if a story from Digg’s blog or submitted by Kevin Rose is buried.)
• A story uses BREAKING: in the title. This one is pretty hit and miss. One day you’ll be able to legally drive home, the next you might wake up in a Mexican prison.
• A story with [Pic] [Pics] or [Pictures] is dugg. (Drink twice if the story also uses two or more of the following words amazing, insane, incredible, awesome, ever, best)
• A story about Apple is dugg. This includes all Apple products and commercials. (If you’re really adventurous you can watch one of these stories and drink every time the word “fanboy” is used in the comments. Only the most experienced alcoholic should attempt this one.)

Enjoy!

Update: apparently Diggnation came up with a digg drinking game. I’ve not yet seen their list but I had fun coming up with this one and did not consult their version when creating it.

If you’ve read even a couple articles here (really that’s all that exist right now), you’ll probably have picked up on the fact that I have a few bones to pick with Digg. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the site, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’m on the site daily, I’ve submitted nearly 1500 articles, and I think it is one of the defining sites of the Web 2.0 movement. But, as I said, there are some issues Digg desperately needs to address. The first is the issue of buries and that data that we have already covered. The second issue of course (and the real reason behind the first issue) is that of censorship and moderation. We’ve touched on this issue before as well, however as you may have heard, Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, again addressed the issue in an interview with Search Marketing Standard (If it doesn’t show up here soon, I’ll post a scan.). The only problem is, he once again contradicted himself.

Rose had previously admitted both that Digg has moderators, and exercises editorial control over the content on its site, specifically the front page. This should not come as news to you, especially since one of our previous posts pretty convincingly proved that Digg was censoring their front page content to prevent any articles critical of Digg from hitting their front page. However, in this latest interview, Rose reverses course and claims that “Digg does not use any moderators other than the 700,000 registered users that participate in Digg.”

WHAT?!?

Look, you don’t have to take my word for it that Rose is pulling a patented political maneuver on this one. Just take a look at these compilations of Kevin Rose quotes on the issue of Digg moderation. As I’ve said before, what separates Digg from the rest of the crowd is its lack of moderation. Many Digg users migrated to Digg from slashdot precisely because they were sick of the moderation going on at that site. They wanted to have a say in which stories were promoted and which issues were discussed. Rose likely thinks that Digg would face a storm of criticism and negative press if they admitted the front page was actively monitored, and at times edited to suit ownership’s agenda. And, it’s possible that they would. But it’s got to be better than continually losing credibility by talking out of both sides of your mouth…

It’s an epidemic sweeping the online world. Thousands have already caught it, and millions have been exposed. To date, there’s no known cure. Symptoms include, but are not limited to…

10 Symptoms of adDiggtion!

1. You are incapable of typing only one “g” and it’s really startingg to gget annoyingg…
2. Your first reaction to celebrity deaths, natural disasters, and terrorist acts has become “That’s terrible… I should Digg this.”
3. You’re under the age of 50 and yet still say “Can you Digg it” on a regular basis…
4. You’re family thinks you’re morbid because “You’re always talking about burials”
5. You’ve tried to use the phrase “Pics or it didn’t happen” with your parents, girlfriend or the cops
6. When people piss you off you give them a thumbs down instead of flipping them off…
7. Your wife had to get a “digg it” tattoo to get your attention.
8. You’re name appears anywhere on this list …
9. You entered a 12 step program but skipped two steps “Because Top 10 lists have a better shot of becoming popular”…
10. And last but not least, the final symptom of adDiggtion…. You’re still reading this list…

If you’ve exhibited any or all of these symptoms, you should seek help immediately… But you’ll have to get in line behind me.

USA Today, the nation’s largest newspaper, has introduced social media (web 2.0) features to their website, and in a big way. From the announcement:

“Our website has a new look. But the real change is in the approach, not the appearance.

With the new features we’ve introduced on the site, readers will have the ability to:

• Scan other news sources directly on USATODAY.com;
• See how readers are reacting to stories;
• Recommend stories and comments to other readers;
• Comment directly on stories;
• Participate in discussion forums;
• Write reviews (of movies, music and more);
• Contribute photos;
• Better communicate with USA TODAY staff.”

Most of these new features will be very familiar to social media junkies, however, by making these changes, USA Today has just introduced millions of its readers to social media for the first time. So how good a job did they do? I’ll take you through a quick walk through of their features and let you decide for yourself.

The first and most obvious feature will be seen by users upon visiting USA Today’s site.

As you can see, the site’s new “approach” involves a Digg or Reddit like system of users voting or “Recommend”-ing the stories they find most interesting. And of course, what voting system would be complete without a corresponding “Popular” page?

Naturally to be able to vote on stories or save your favorite stories, users must first register for an account. Once again, this is nothing new to experienced social media users and the interface is fairly intuitive. Upon logging in, users are taken to their personal home page or control panel.

Right off the bat users are introduced to the plethora of options available to them which have been incorporated from several different social media or web 2.0 sites. They can message friends or leave comments on stories and blog entries through a MySpace or Facebook inspired functionality.

Users can create photo albums to share with the world reminiscent of what some call the original web 2.0 site, Flickr.

USA Today even allows users to create blog posts of their own. To be honest, the inclusion of this feature surprised me a bit as it will require quite a lot of oversight and monitoring to deter abuse or entries that could become a source of embarrassment for the paper.

One obvious feature that users will likely miss is the ability to submit or suggest stories of their own a la Reddit or Digg. However, given the fact that USA Today is a news source in and of itself, and also has an enormous staff of it’s own writers, the absence of that feature shouldn’t come as a surprise.

So there you have it folks, the nation’s largest newspaper has adopted the social media model and jumped into web 2.0 with both feet. If nothing else, the move will expose millions of new users to social media and all the options and interactions it has to offer. But, as a social media aficionado what do you think of USA Today’s social media effort?

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s been a LOT of uproar lately about Digg’s bury data. While this article is NOT about the accuracy of the data, or the alleged “bury brigade” I believe some background information is warranted. Over the course of two hours, some of Digg’s bury data, including member names, was gathered using an exploit of Digg Spy. Despite the fact that only 25% of the data was attributed to the correct members, the data sent the blogosphere buzzing. The buzzing quickly became a roar as more and more blogs began weighing in and accused users spoke up in their own defense. The situation peaked when Digg founder, Kevin Rose, responded to a Wired article covering the subject, with his own blog post “On Buries and Blocking” in which Rose addresses the question behind all these different blog posts…

Why won’t Digg disclose who buries a story?

Digg Weighs In
Well according to Rose’s post, it’s “For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works.” Unfortunately for Rose and Digg as a whole, the logic behind this argument is flawed. Digg allows the public to see which members dugg each and every story that gets submitted. In fact, any visitor to Digg is able to view each and every story a particular member dugg, submitted, and commented on. Despite all this available data, we still don’t know much about Digg’s promotional algorithm. Submissions make the front page with varying numbers of diggs and in varying time intervals. We know that not all diggs are created equal in that the vote of one member might carry more weight than the vote of another member. There’s speculation that friends voting for your submission counts less than someone not on your friend list. There’s even speculation that Digg is, or soon will be, taking into account how the voting member got to your submission! We even have the upcoming and hot lists which indicate which submissions have had the most activity recently and which are in line to be promoted. However, those lists only serve to create more confusion as I’ve seen stories with 90+ diggs be passed over for the front page in favor of a story that had only 29 diggs. So, as you can see, despite having a veritable wealth of knowledge about who dugg a story, we’re really no closer to figuring out Digg’s promotion algorithm.

Continuing that logic, why would disclosing similar bury information allow members to exploit the system any further? Digg could disclose which members buried a story, why they buried it, as well as every story a member has ever buried and as long as they incorporated the same algorithm they use for promotion, members would be no closer to figuring that formula out than they are now. If that logic is not enough to convince you, consider the fact that Netscape, one of Digg’s competitors, allows visitors to view this exact data and has suffered no ill effects. In fact, the argument can be made that revealing this data, and the accountability factor that accompanied it, seems to have allowed Netscape to avoid dealing with a “bury brigade” of their own.

Then Why?
So, the question still remains, why won’t Digg disclose the data about which users are burying which stories? If not for the sake of their algorithms, then why?

The truth is, Digg needs the mysticism of the “bury brigade.” Currently, when a story passes into obscurity on Digg, people assume the story has been buried. If a story is controversial, many assume the phantom “bury brigade” must have struck again. The only problem is, that’s not ALWAYS the case. As the first stories of this leaked data started hitting Digg, they naturally gained many votes very quickly. Skitzzo’s submission of the raw data gained 13 diggs within the first 15 minutes and yet was removed from the upcoming list a mere 5 minutes later. So, was the story buried? Well given that the story was being dugg at a rate of nearly one a minute, it seems unlikely. Also taking into consideration the fact that, in my experience, the “bury brigade” is a very popular topic in discussions regarding Digg, it seems even more unlikely that the story received enough bury votes to remove it from the queue. Throw in the fact that BloodJunkie’s submission of an editorial of this data that had also received nearly a digg a minute disappeared at the same time as the raw data submission and I think it becomes obvious these submissions were manually removed.

While Digg never claimed to be a democratic system of sorts, they’ve certainly tried to avoid any blatant displays of censorship. More often than not, the Digg community takes care of spam, and most articles that criticize Digg, draw the ire of the community and are buried with a vengeance. However, in rare occurrences like the submissions discussed above or other, possibly inflammatory submissions, Digg needs to be able to remove articles from the upcoming list and prevent them from gaining the instant publicity imbued on front page stories. If information about buries were available to the public, Digg’s censorship would be blatantly obvious. Rather than being able to hide behind the possibility that these controversial stories had been buried by the members, Digg would be forced to defend their removal of the story.

So why doesn’t Digg release their bury data? Because it’s easier for Digg if the public blames the so called “bury brigade” rather than questioning the site’s leadership. As long as buries remain a mystery, Digg can control the content on their site in any way they deem appropriate without being held accountable. In short, Digg needs the “bury brigade.”

Update:
You can add this story to those affected by the mythical “bury brigade”. This story rocketed to the top of Digg in only an hour getting 70 diggs over that time. It was then promoted the front page where it gained another 60 diggs over the course of 10 minutes. It then magically disappeared from the front page and all lists. I guess I should probably thank Digg for perfectly illustrating my point. If they offered proof that only 3 or 4 people had buried this story in contrast to the 135+ that have dugg it, they’d have to admit that they manually pulled the story from the site simply because they didn’t agree with it. If people were faced with the fact that Digg was censoring their content to suit their beliefs or opinions, tough questions would be asked. Questions like “How long until Digg starts pulling down anti-Microsoft articles since MS sponsors the Diggnation episodes?” or “What if a political candidate offered Digg a large sum of money to make sure all articles that made the front page supported their positions or made their opponents look bad?” would most certainly be asked, and would require answers. However, as it stands now, people can always blame the evil bury brigade. Personally I think it’s become blatantly obvious that Digg is headed down the very slippery slope of censorship.

As the title says, I’d like to welcome you to Social-Media-News.com. In this space we’ll cover the news and events from around the social media scene. We’ll discuss sites from Flickr, to Digg, to Del.icio.us, to the new social start up sites. If it deals with social media or bookmarking and it’s news worthy, we’ll cover it.

But most importantly, in the Web 2.0 spirit, we’ll be getting feedback from you, our readers, to constantly improve the site and deliver more of what you want, when and how you want it. So, enjoy, and be sure to drop us a line with your suggestions!