FOWA Notes: Crowd generated media - Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose: Digg.com

Crowd generated media

Digg ecosystem

Why should the crowd care? How do you get people to interact with your site?

Creating incentives on every level

Why should people submit content (slashdot, del.icio.us)
Slashdot has 500 new stories every day. I asked the founder What's the motivation? People want to see their name in lights. Their username on the fontpage.
Joshua Schacter is a buddy of mine. He saw it as place to store you favorites but overtime it evolved into sharing content.

I realised it needed to be easy to syndicate the data

Why do people Digg? (empower indiciduals)
People are interested in looking at upcoming stories and push them up to the front page.
Monkeys with three nipples (Editor: does this sum up digg?)

Content -> Diggs -> Quality -> Word of Mouth -> More traffic -> 3rd Party Site Traffic -> Smart Digg Buttons

Javascript buttons checks to see if a story is on digg and then allows people to digg it from your site.

Enhancing Digg

How many people use Digg? What do they want to see tomorrow?

900,000+ users - building community tools to manage discussion / Room to breath
How can we allow the community to manage themselves.

Reward system for community accepted topic level activities. We need to reward good contributors.

Fact checking / system to dispute and review inaccurate information. Community not paid staff (won't scale)
Staff wouldn't be representing the community.

Swarming the story w/ additional info (links pics and videos etc)

Location based opinions (visual diggs / heat map)

Friend recommendations Digg #3000 who is #2999?

Friend vs Tailgate (someone you know or part of your filter)

Location based introductions.
People that are near to you that have similar connections

Connections base on more than one data point (Diggs, buries, Comments, Word strength, Social connections)
We can use all of these different data points to make connections.

Not just friends but stories (upcoming)
Based on your previous diggs here's some upcoming stories that you might like.

Analyze and understand your data.
We need to work out who's trying to game the site.

Graph of Digg data that's never been seen before.

... (kinda need to see the slides for this :-( )

The patterns allow us to see people that are rigging the system. We can see patterns in terms of regions of the country etc. Groups that always agree...
I was upset by it at first but now I see it as something we have to deal with.

Flash visualisations
Flash Toolkit
Latest tools, BigSpy, Stack update
Future apps.

Playing Well with others

Digg API - Extracting your site data
Export your attention data
Export friend networks
openID (applause)
Del.icio.us, reddit, newsvine, Facebook

Quick stats:

900,000 + users
50,000,000 + diggs
155,000,000+pages in january

Q (jeremy keith): I see Digg as a technological success but a social failure. Look at the comments people act like assholes.
A: We can't expect 900,000 people to get on. We can't put everyone into one room. We are looking to fragment this.

Q (Ian forrester): have you looked at APML
A: We'll check it out

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