Archive for the ‘Digg’ Category
DiggGames.com Shut Down by Digg
Saturday, August 26th, 2006In yet another case of “when trademarks go bad”, Digg has shutdown DiggGames.com for trademark infringement. This is yet another reminder to Pliggers to NOT use the word Digg anywhere in their domain or site. We have seen a similar move from when Digg.de (no longer around, but here’s a demo video) began redirecting links to Yigg.de. Yigg.de supposedly never came under any legal threat from Digg because Digg at the time had no trademark registered in Germany. Yigg has since changed much of their template to further itself from Digg and now sports a grey and orange template.
DiggGames.com’s trademark trouble is a bit of a surprise to me. The site is used only to promote games that are dugg on digg.com, but the style of the site is nothing like Digg. Not that you have to spell out your name and look like digg to get sued, but I would think that having no impact on digg.com would decrease your legal exposure. I remember an instance of a Chinese site using Pligg to create a Digg look-a-like in Chinese using I believe Digg.cn as their domain name, but that domain seems to no longer resolve. I have also seen several Pligg sites using the word “digg” in their domain, so this blog post is dedicated to the handful of you who might want to find yourselves a new domain name because Digg is on the lookout.
Alex Bosworth’s Digg Button Workaround
Monday, May 8th, 2006Since Digg has not yet built in a live voting method from third party sites, many users have been trying to figure out a way around this problem so that users could vote directly from their own sites. Alex Bosworth’s blog post from yesterday shows an interesting workaround for getting a live Digg button and article to display on his own site. The result is some tricky iframe-like javascript.
As you can see, it cuts off a tiny bit of the vote box, but it is probably as close to perfection that we can get without the release of some Digg API. This javascript is generated automatically by using a php web page where you enter in your own data for the Digg url, story title, and description. There is even an option to enter in your own css, which is something that I haven’t yet experimented with. Kudos to Alex for posting such an interesting workaround, I hope he releases his code so that we can play around with it for even more interesting ideas.
Digg Now Offers Google IG Module
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006I’m sure that many of you reading this already have a Gmail account with Google and perhaps a few of you have tried out Google’s IG page. Basically Google IG is a personalized homepage for Google that lets you organize and add content in any fashion that you would want. Digg recently released a Google IG module to add Digg to Google’s IG page. Unfortunately, you can’t vote directly from the Google page, the vote button will take you to the individual article to then cast your vote. The script also suffers from vote lag and the numbers will not accurately reflect new votes. You can set the refresh rate to no refresh, 1 minute, 5 minutes or 10 minutes to keep the stories up to date. You can also select whether you want to display the top stories or your friend’s dugg stories. Let’s face it, you are pretty much putting a customizable RSS feed for Digg on Google IG with this module. It’s nothing to hoot and holler about, but it’s a nice feature for those who use both Digg and Google IG frequently.
Digg’s New Comment System (video)
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006Digg has yet to officially release this feature, but they posted a link to a video demonstrating it on digg.com. My initial reaction to the video was, “hey I came up with that idea” for a small bit of AJAX used to shrink unwanted comments to a bar. Digg also showed off much needed threaded comments, yet another feature on the Pligg to-do list. Two of the features showed off by Digg, Pligg already has in the latest Beta 7 build. This includes the ability to vote + and - for comments and the ability to edit comments. The editing comments idea still needs to be mastered in Pligg, and the same goes for editing articles. The final feature highlights friends posts with the color green. Not the most necessary addition, but I’m sure some folks will appreciate it.
Digg Updates, But Doesn’t Innovate
Friday, February 3rd, 2006Yesterday Kevin posted about some new features on the official Digg blog. As I have mentioned in the past, Digg really hasn’t come out of it’s shell to offer great new abilities. Instead they tend to only make small improvements on what already exists. This new update is a perfect example. Perhaps the only update worth mentioning is the ability to report stories as being “inaccurate”. When enough users report a story as inaccurate the story will be removed from the que and a banner will be added to the top of the article saying that it is “under review”. This is probably Digg’s first real method for removing spam entries, but it is still inadequate. This new ability still could really wreak havoc on legitmate posts. Here’s what Digg’s Blog entry had to say:
Spy: Stories now start scrolling right away (no initial delay). We have also slowed down the refresh rate slightly.
Report stories as ‘inaccurate’: Digg now allows logged in users to bury stories as ‘inaccurate’. Once enough people bury the story, it is removed from the queue and the following banner is displayed at the top:
This is similar to the way Wikipedia marks entries that are potentially inaccurate.
Profanity filter: Logged in user now have the option to turn on a comment profanity filter (http://digg.com/users/username/profile).
Slashcode
Sunday, January 29th, 2006Those familiar with Digg are usually familiar with the even more popular tech news site Slashdot.org. I have never really been a fan of Slashdot’s system for promoting stories through editors because I felt like it really limited the amount of news and would slow the ability for news to quickly get picked up by the public. The code originally used to create Slashdot has been publicly released with a GNU GPL.
The project’s name is Slashcode, and it’s so cold right now that you can pretty much consider it dead. The changelog doesn’t list any changes since 2003, which kind of proves why Slashdot is quickly becoming outdated. Luckily the documentation provided supplies users with enough information to install the code if you have a good amount of computer knowledge, but the code is far from a simple install script.
The reason I bring up this code is to demonstrate a proof of concept that Digg really shouldn’t have anything to fear by offering their code to the general public. Having a project like Pligg around really isn’t meant to replace Digg, it’s only meant to offer a new type of Content Managemnt System for users out there who are tired of so called “Web 1.0″ web applications that offer very little user interraction besides the ability to post comments.
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