Jay Adelson has written as great overview of why online metrics suck. Jay is behind both Revision3 and Digg, and seems to me to be one of the few people outside Google that understands how the web really works.
For example, Digg did 18.5 million unique visitors in July, 2007, as measured by WSS. Remember, WSS uses a pixel and is a third-party service, so we’re not talking about “internal logs.” … In an article in Fortune making similar points to this blog entry, they even got it wrong, citing the number as 10.5 million. ComScore still says 4 million. The Digg employees look at each other and just shake our heads. Essentially, the numbers being traded around about how many people visit Digg is are completely wrong. Stop the insanity.
The thing that makes it all such a pain in the ass is that until there’s a standardized way of counting hits and views and other such stuff, the web world is no further along than how TV viewers are measured (which is so foolishly backward it’s truly mind-boggling). There needs to be a standards organization, and any subscribers to that org will be able to say “we have 10,000 viewers”, and know that their definition of a viewer is the same as any other site’s. Otherwise, it’s all just junk and guesswork.
I’m coming to think that good reliable metrics are the first thing that needs to be done, before the internet movement can really start to chip away at TV. Maybe Digg and Rev3 can start fixing the problem. I really hope so.
Kevin Rose finally responded to the controversy with Digg killing AACS posts, saying in part:
You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
It’s a good sentiment, but I wonder how much damage has been done. A lot of people said he should have said that at the start of the fiasco, so the statement almost smells like reading from a script.
I point the admins of Digg to my article on this very subject. It’s not just for small sites. Big ones geet knocked over with just as much ease.
I think it’d be fun for some MIT System Dynamics student to do up a simulation model of this phenomenon and make it public domain, if only so that other Web 2.0 owners can get a better sense of what kind of damage their somewhat-reasonable actions will cause them.
Yeesh.
An interesting post at The Mu Life about how people don’t read posts on sites like Digg, but judge them by the ethereal meta-data they carry. I would carry it one step further by saying that there is a fantastic prejudice on some sites against blogs in general, and it’s not healthy.
If blogs are the op-ed pages of the 21st century, and some of the most interesting commentary originates there, you can’t automatically dismiss those pieces as amateur garbage without reading them. I’ve read great posts submitted to Digg that were dugg down by folks who obviously didn’t read the source, saying “personal blog, no digg”. While it’s true that many personal blogs spew crap all over the place (like me!), you should at least give the first paragraph a read before you pass judgement on something.
I find it funny how people tout Digg as the replacement for big media newspapers, putting control of the stories back in the hands of the public… and at the same time they refuse to grant the slightest shred of credibility to writers who don’t collect a paycheque from old media enterprises like the New York Times.
Or, put another way: don’t judge a book by its cover, and certainly not just by the URL you found it at.
Update: Excellent follow-up and further exploration at isolationism.com. I didn’t actually read it all, I just wanted to be the first to link to it.
Update 2: I kid! I kid!
Techcrunch is reporting that Condé Nast has acquired Reddit. And Google acquired Jotspot. For the longest time I thought this whole idea of DotCom 2.0 was just people being pessimistic, but now I’m starting to worry that the bubble’s going to burst before this next generation of too-crazy-to-be-true ideas really finds its footing.
Reddit is a great site (I keep meaning to add it to my sidebar) but I really wonder how it can operate as part of a bigger traditional-media company. Making it a sub-element of the Wired site (for instance) kinda deflates its value, but they wouldn’t outright replace Wired either. So what’s the value of having something that just acts as an aggregator for the stuff they produce? The thing I worry about is that they’ll start to give their own content a special spotlight in the system, which undermines the philosophy of Reddit, and would start the user bleed, possibly over to Digg. And then they’ll have bought something that doesn’t have much value.
The thing I wonder about is this: in this crazy world, with an online code of ethics (mainly unspoken), can the creators of Reddit ever really move on to their next big project (if they even want to), or is the fact that they’re selling a community site to a big corporation going to hurt their chances of making another “grassroots” site in the future?
I wish companies would stop acquiring each other today. I’m not getting any work done.
