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Digg gets $28.7 additional funding

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Kevin Rose’s Digg today received $28.7 million in additional funding from Highland Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and SVB Capital. The additional funding brings the total amount raised by Digg to $40 million.

The new funding would allow Digg to pursue its international expansion plan, promote its brand aggressively, and more than double its current size of employees.

The new funding should also put to rest any rumors of acquisition.

“We want to be independent,” Digg CEO Jay Adelson said.

Originally posted on September 24, 2008 @ 3:36 pm

Share Content With Wildfeed

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Billing itself as a ‘new generation exposure engine,’ Wildfeed is designed to help you share your favorite Web content.  Using a specialized community, you will be sent regular e-mails containing links of interest.  This content is selected by the editorial community and aims to ‘discover and expose creativity, innovation and expression in the digital universe.’

Participation in the editorial process is not required and subscriptions are free.  However, as an incentive, members who submit stories and bring friends under the tent, have access to a greater number of features and hold more influence over what gets published (stories that are ‘published’ get included in e-mail broadcasts.)

The name ‘wildfeed’ refers to the act of catching private video clips that may not be accessible to the public at large.

Created by a digital media pro and a social worker, the site pushes the tagline ‘freedom of expression.’

Originally posted on May 13, 2008 @ 7:54 pm

Digg up for grabs

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digg logoThe fiercest forces of the online world, Google and Microsoft, are clashing once again. At the center is the popular user-driven social content site, Digg.

According to TechCrunch, both giants are eagerly excited to bid for Digg at a price lower than $300 million. According to guesstimate, Google will play within the range of $200-$225 million. On the other hand, Gate’s gang is expected to offer lower since it has an advertising tie-up with Digg since July 2007. Moreover, there are two mysterious media/news companies that will likely bid.

Who do you think will win in this bidding war? Google is notorious for its aggressive acquisitions and bold ambition to wreak havoc in uncharted territories such as the wireless industry.

On the other hand, Microsoft is a monopoly losing its touch but has enough power left to pull some strings. Just ask Yahoo if you don’t believe me.

Originally posted on March 7, 2008 @ 12:09 pm

Digg algorithm update makes the community go loco

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digg revoltHey Mixx get this! The Digg community is up in arms over the recent algorithm tweaking implemented by the social bookmarking giant. The bone of contention is that users need to get a lot more votes before they can get on the front page.

Digg founder Kevin Rose confirmed the algo changes to “give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page”. Unfortunately, the social mob did not see it his way. Some of the users formed a special site named Revoltnation to encourage other Digg users to join the cause. The following are the list of the main charges against Digg:

  1. Lack of communication and disregard for the Digg community
  2. Unexplained and unacknowledged banning of top users
  3. Lack of transparency – Digg only shows you the stories that people have dugg, but not the ones that are buried.
  4. The auto-bury list – For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever.
  5. Repeated and flagrant disrespect of its top users

Though I’m not a heavy Digg user, these things can be settled easily if only the people behind this popular site shared their plans to the Digg community. Since it is powered by user-generated contents, they owe their success to the community. It is but proper to hear the voices of the people before implementing some major changes.

More details at search engine land

Originally posted on January 24, 2008 @ 12:24 pm

Digg popularity rankings exposed by Qliktech

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QlikTech announced the availability of “Dugg Analyzer,” a free tool that analyzes traffic and postings on Digg, providing new transparency in determining how web content is popularized and what sources feed the site.

Based on QlikTech’s award-winning analysis solution, QlikView’s Dugg Analyzer provides instant visual insight by category, subject, source, reporter and any other dimension. The QlikView
application can be viewed at

Analysis using Digg Dugg shows that YouTube was the most linked to site on Digg, having had more than 10 times as many front-page stories as the next most popular video site until August 2007. Since then, however, there has been a sudden drop in the number of YouTube stories reaching the front page. YouTube news is now similar in popularity to other video sites.

QlikView was able to easily look at Digg data and determine that a small minority of people – 100 – is responsible for 40% of content that thousands see and read. This is down from a previously reported 56% of most popular content in 2006.

Originally posted on January 24, 2008 @ 11:47 am