One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog:
- Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch.
- The Recommendation Engine is running strong: at any given point in time, the system is generating over 54 Million Recommendations, with the average Digger having nearly 200 Recommendations from an average of 34 “Diggers like you”.
- Friend activity/friends added is up 24%.
- Commenting is up 11% since launch.
Digg’s recommendation engine takes a Last.fm approach to finding people’s whose tastes overlap with yours and then suggesting stories they’ve Dugg up but that you’ve missed. It is collaborative filtering for news.
As Digg becomes more mainstream, it needs technologies such as this to bring it back to its glory days when everybody was interested in the same niche categories. Social recommendations work best when they are extracted from niche communities who are obsessive about one or two topics. Digg started out as a haven for hardcore techies, but has branched out.
The recommendation system is designed to, in effect, help Diggers carve out their own niche communities again. If you happen to like tech industry news, you will see stories from other like-minded Diggers. If you prefer politics or sports, you’ll get those stories. And if you like a combination, the system will grab recommendations from each appropriate bucket.
At least, that is how it is supposed to work in theory. The recommendations seem decent. But I personally haven’t noticed anything that really strikes home. Over time, it should get better.
Ya.. Using digg recommendation engine, I like to digg more and more.
Shouldn’t the title read “40% More Diggs” rather than “40 More Diggs”?
Why hasn’t google bought it out?
Googel doesn’t like them?
water discovered on MARS!!!! story here…. http://www.goth...te.blogspot.com
The old system was so bad that a few of the top members actually stoped submitting out of frustration.
It appears that recognition is the drive that keeps Digg and others going strong.
If that is what the public wants – give it to them – after all they are giving thousands of dollars in free labor to keep the site popular.
Most members don’t even submit anything
I really like the recommendations that they give, however I find that I miss out on really good stories when I don’t switch back to the All Upcoming tab.
The new recommendation engine has also widened the gap between number of stories that top users are getting frontpaged and normal users.
40%?? Bullshit
Like @Lame Duck I’m struck by the startlingly unscientific nature of the numbers. No time periods, no real verifiable numbers. 40%? What exactly does that mean?
90% of all statistics can be made to say anything… 50% of the time!
Calacanis had said that “Rose’s Digg got the inspiration from Delicious, and that Netscape got it from Digg – that everything is an evolution.
it is not good enough to do what it claims for.
Ever since the release, suddenly articles with over 300 diggs aren’t making the home page. I don’t know if this is the magic fix for the upcoming section.
That’s been going on for quite a while. It’s all about “democratizing media”. Anyway I track the best non-homepaged stories on my blog:
http://owenbyrn...npromoted-list/
Is that similar to what http://www.matchkey.com is doing?
ok…. 54 mil reco…
200 average
so 54 mil / 200 = 270000
so what does that tell us ………
Actually, not good enough.