DiggBar, the new shortURL and toolbar service from Digg, is certainly useful. I expect it to become my default short URL service on Twitter since it is so easy to create a short URL by simply adding Digg.com/ in front of any URL. It will redirect to a short Digg URL like digg.com/d1npNz, which is this story rendered with the DiggBar (click that Digg button!).
The Twitter crowd already loves this based on all the chatter I saw on the site today. This will also expose a lot of new people to Digg since anyone that clicks on the link will see the toolbar wrapper with the view count, Digg comments and other information on the top. And it will also increase Digg’s overall traffic substantially – unlike other short URL services, Digg doesn’t simply redirect to the longer URL. It keeps you on Digg and shows the site being pointed to in an iframe wrapper. You can get to the underlying URL by clicking on the X button on the top right.
But Digg didn’t stop there. They’re also using DiggBar for all stories on Digg as well. So all those home page stories that send massive amounts of traffic around the web are now redirecting right back to Digg, too. That keeps all that traffic in the Digg ecosystem, to the detriment of the sites being linked to.
For most purposes those sites won’t care. The page is still rendered and includes the advertising. The way most internal analytics software works means that page views will still be counted. But some services, like Comscore, won’t necessarily see the visit to the site, and will penalize the domain name.
I’d expect Digg to add text advertising to the DiggBar over time, sooner rather than later. It should be a material revenue source for them.
Overall it’s a brilliant move by Digg. I’m surprised no one has complained yet though about Digg home page traffic no longer going to the sites being listed.
Rad
This is HUGE but I think the whole point of entry is a bit clunky for average user.
Follow me now @ http://twitter.com/IanMikutel
just cant ask for more!
Hmm.. The bar should scroll up instead of static. My laptop is too small to keep that big bar. And ad icon revenue in bar in future?
I said the same thing yesterday about how seo-wise this is bad for users. Lots of ppl will link directly to the diggbar url rather then the actual page.
Also the ads is something I predict will be a cause for concern -at what point do we draw the line where they are advertising other people’s content?
I’ll have to write a post about my predictions on this, I see this as brilliance for Digg but really bad news for the SEO and webmaster community.
No, actually this is a very bad idea.
DiggBar is nothing but frame spam that steals content, traffic, and revenue from publishers.
http://tomuse.c...money-publisher
More importantly it does nothing but clutter the web. Once Digg is allow to do this, others will follow and the Web will be nothing more than frames within frames.
http://tomuse.c...-need-your-help
Time to digg out those old scripts that prevent your site from being put in a frame by a malicious site.
Which means any Twitter status or page can’t be linked to (since they have that breakout code in place every since the Don’t Click CSRF attack)
it’s 1997 all over again. who was it that got their start with something like this, about.com or everything.com? that’s pretty much where breakout scripts began.
I can’t remember anyone using them successfully besides free hosts like Tripod/Geocities.
This probably needs an update: http://en.wikip...wiki/HTML_frame
Anyway, if this gets me Digg traffic I will use it.
That looks to be a cool thing.
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
WHAT looks like a cool thing you fucking spammer? Stop saying stupid shit just to get your spam blog to the top.
Try contributing something meaningful to the discussion.
Rather be angry at techcrunch for not catching this…
Handle this the same way you would some flamebait.
It is nofollow anyway, so it is a wasted link.
It would be nice if Digg would detect the UA, and if it was a GoogleBot (or other search bot) redirect to the actual page.
This way they could at least maintain some sort of SEO credibility for the linked sites.
That would be inappropriate.
Instead, they should set the HTTP Content-Location header to reflect the original URL.
Yes, the original URL has to be there. Putting someone else’s content in an iFrame is plain wrong. And any talk of putting Ads on the Digg bar would only add insult to the injury.
What would Digg do if TechCrunch put Digg’s content into an iFrame, put a “Crunch Bar” with Google ads in it? Same difference.
Your comment made me think of Gator (Claria), back when they were trying to hijack other websites by basically placing ads over those on major Web sites. Gator paid a big price for those shenanigans, since none of the big sites could acquire them (and many were looking) without risk of being tainted by the adware image.
I clicked on a digg link tonight (somewhat ironically, the new cyber ’security’ (anti-privacy) legislation, and only kind of noticed the wrap. Only because I have a small screen, so I instantly hit the “x” to get rid of it. I was fleetingly annoyed.
Ah ok, makes sense then. Hopefully they will do *something* >_>
I agree with you on that one. Most URL shorteners use a 301 redirect ( http://is.gd/eW0J )which is what Google recommends ( http://is.gd/qx8m ) . It’s trivial to check the user agent strings and redirect appropriately.
What their doing is wrong. JS breakout code would work to kill the DiggBar but all Digg links to your site will still be pointing to Digg.com so it doesn’t really solve the problem.
The iframe wrapper technique has been around since the first dot come boom. What does this mean? Sites like the NYTimes refuse to be included in an iframe and bust out promptly. This technique use to be considered content theft. Who else uses this technique and already has it in production? Facebook. Does this technique break the web? Kinda, it will be interesting to see how Google treats these things. I will tell you that the shorten URLs don’t have good link juice. I use the technique in a project I’m working on, but my urls are long and SEO friendly.
For the record, when I launch, I didn’t copy Digg. I saw what Facebook was doing for this particular feature
For fun why don’t you share a short Digg link in Facebook and see what happens!
This is really a brilliant move on Digg’s part. Once they get a nice foothold on the micro-blogging services they can use the data (re-tweet count, etc) to factor in to the order of the stories and determine which ones will show up on the home page, how long they stay there, etc. Very cool!
As a “webmaster” (not sure what else to call myself) this is annoying because the link juice isn’t there anymore (unless it was nofollow before anyway?).
But, as a user of Digg I have no problems with it. Might reduce some of the submission spam if there are no SEO benefits.
You’re wrong… there is a link to the actual content page inside of the digg header, so the link juice is still there.
The bar does contain a real (non-Javascript, non-nofollowed) link to the content. However, it also contains a better link in which the title of the content is linked to the Digg individual entry page. I’ve seen search results where a Digg post outranks the page it links to; I don’t know whether that was just an outlier or whether that happens all the time.
One way around that would be to use a generic “come-on” title when submitting to Digg, but there may be problems with that.
Note also that Digg added nofollow to links left in comments.
They also allowed their “liberal” users to get me banned supposedly because I left links in comments but actually because I showed how comments from said “liberals” were wrong. It took several email messages to get Digg to un-ban me, and they never admitted the real reason why I’d been reported.
I have a digg button on each page, but I load it using Javascript so it doesn’t pass link juice. If you’re linking to Digg using a regular link, return the favor by putting nofollow tags on those links.
I see this all the time. The Digg pages ranks higher than the page it’s linking to.
stinks
Content theft. Plain and simple.
It was 8 years ago. It is today.
Bad karma.
How is it content theft, I don’t get it? If you get on the fp, you pretty much get listed in one of the top 3 pages of Google, you get thousands of hits, looks like a win-win. Technically they’re benefiting more but still…
but if you’re listed on the front page and the URL is digg.com/asdsd then google may never know you were on the front page.
It’s definitely ranking theft
It steals a large part of the interaction that would otherwise take part on your site (a blog for example). It steals the links that would otherwise go to your site and now go to digg. It steals your rankings in google as digg will outrank most sites almost automatically.
Oh, and they also steal your revenue as they run ads in the toolbar.
Theft plain and simple.
I’d call it ‘Referrer theft’
Site owners will never know ‘where’ someone visited their sire ‘from’ as the HTTP REFERRER in their logs will only the show the shortened Digg url and not the url of the page the shortened link was clicked on.
I just tested it with a few shorteners, including my own.
How long until they start doing dishing out the ban hammer with this as well.
Eh, I cant stand url shortener’s that put those stupid bars on top, just because its is digg is no exception.
Though I can see digg trying to get into the twitter market a little bit more with something like this
This one is pretty nice in that there is a “Always hide the toolbar” option. I’m assuming they’re using a cookie, but that’s still considerate of them.
As soon as I noticed that option, I enabled it. I can see this being a nice tool for “power” users of Digg (so-to-speak), but for the average user like me, who just wants to see what’s on the homepage, it was annoying as all hell.
When I’m looking at a Digg story, I actually want to go to the REAL page the story came from. Because I noticed that as I click links on the page I’m viewing, the Diggbar remained, essentially keeping all of my link-jumping on Digg. And I’m not a fan of that.
Tricky, tricky. This wasn’t mentioned in the post, but if you expand the related/source sections on the bar Digg will display a CPM ad. So Mike, they’re already doing ads in the bar!
If they can entrench themselves as the default shortener in Twitter and Twitter continues growth this could be huge.
The first time I tried to expand the source feature it crashed Firefox. I think it had to do with the ad loading, but I could easily be wrong
So they’re running ads on our content now too, eh? Now they’ve crossed the line from highly irritating to plain evil.
How do they handle httpS pageS? Will dig be able to scrap user input data into there iframed page? I guess what I am saying is this won’t work if safety is a concern in my mind. Other then that they will be grabbing all kinds of user data. I always wanted to rewrite the domain name system to be more efficient. Does this toolbar work on mobile platforms?
It wont . I tried couple of browsers…
The browser will allow that, across domains due to XSS problems. Try it out here: http://www.burn...hammertime.html
It’s going to hurt them in SEO.
Digg isnt fun anymore
Very smart implementation. I suspect this is going to be wildly popular among most of the Twittering Digg addicts. Time will tell how it affects the analytics on each individual site – my guess is that most content providers will like it just because it increases their popularity on Digg itself.
Still, I am surprised that there is not a more general uproar about it. Digg was always viewed as providing original user generated content that simply pointed to the article. Now they are owning the URL of someone else’s content. It’s clever, unique, and unobtrusive, but it still shows Digg’s domain with someone else’s content below it. I know others are already crying foul about this (even people already in these comments), but I just expected it the dissenters to be louder.
Brilliant? They copied the shadiness of Facebook, where shared links are framed and encouraged to comment on FB instead of the blog/page.
So shady!
I think it’s brilliant and obsessing over SEO is just ridiclous anyway. People are driven toward products ideas apps etc that they relate too. Profit will come from great ideas and products that people are driven too. Comtetant talk about SEO drives me nuts!
Hey, it works! http://digg.com...d1npNz#comments
shortURL ? nah! what does shorturl means to people anymore? imagine if I added shortner…
mwd.com/short
digg.com/s3l45kv4354
yes i own that domain.
If you really cared about short urls, you wouldn’t use digg.com. digg.com is 2 characters longer than bit.ly
which is one character longer than http://tr.im!
This will have to get figured out. http://digg.com...omedy/Diggbarrd
http://ow.ly/2i9d
One way they are already trying to monetize this DiggBar is every 10 or so links using the Random button is a sponsored link (the one I saw was a link to Digg’s store).
I think shared iframed links are a boil on the ass of the internet. Bfd.
it’s like stumble upon but called digg
Really cool idea! Little bit stolen from stumbleupon, but who cares. Digg stories to Yahoo Answers will jump out of the frame though..
bitly gives you stats. digg doesn’t give you a unique short url
http://twiggit.org/ is now using the DiggBar to link to articles in your tweets!
Pretty interesting that they include their Quantcast and their Microsoft Live Analytics code in the bar. I wonder if this is some kind of attempt to inflate their actual traffic numbers so it doesn’t look like they plateaued.
No need to wonder. It’s definitely part of the reason. They need to boost the numbers to show investors.
Personally I think there needs to be a wider perspective on this:
This move is beneficial to Digg and the viewing recipient, they have chosen not to give the required due consideration to the content creator. Which is of course the prerogative of Digg.
Not all content submitted reach the frontpage, however the link which is displayed on digg appears in a manner that includes the title wrapped in the URL. The fact that the link URL is available to the search engines gives some link juice to the original source. but this method is now obsolete.
Content creator who looked at digg for link juice and potential traffic will now only look for potential traffic. But most content creators are uncertain about what makes digg users tick. Content creators may end up deterred from using digg and therefore unexpected news which could have proved to be interesting and worth the digg will less and less be created.
You can not expel the massive number of internet marketeers who have taught the skill of using digg for both the purpose of traffic and link juice. They will stop doing this and consequently this could see a decline in submitted content. However this move will definitely deter spamming, which is no doubt a plus for digg.
Questions regard to the feature of digg toolbar is whether the additional features of viewing, etc is of any use to the person viewing. Do digg users care?
As with any new web based tool , it is the power of marketing and media that will accelerate it to the forefront. Digg however has its user base which is an advantage.
if (top.location != self.location) { top.location.replace(self.location); }
You made my day, HAHAHHAHAHAHA.
see it in action on gigapedia site
http://gigapedia.com/
look at source at the bottom
the code posted 2 comments up breaks out your site from these “frammers”
Who needs that crap? Time to block those.
tweetburner.com … it’s faster and allows a personalized archive for you to track which URL’s that you post are the most popular.
If you digg a already dugg link you can confuse digg (and anybody that tries to read this).
i.e. http://digg.com/u15cD
lol, I see what you did there.
AWESOME!!!
If you click on the comments dropdown in the DiggBar note the large 300×250 ad to the right.
This definitely makes Digg much more consumable now. It is pretty simple to Digg/Comment now.
Cool …
I don know about this new tool from digg..
thanks for sharing!!
Funny to hear the banter on TWiT last week where people jeered a little at Jason Calacanis for copying Digg with his previous venture Propeller/Netscape. Although on the show this was compared to StumbleUpon I seem to remember that on Netscape they had a similar looking bar on the left hand side of the screen to keep you in the Netscape property when you clicked a story. Can anyone else confirm this?
What’s the legal standpoint of this?
Digg is framing your content within their service (you’re viewing your content on the Digg domain)…
If Digg adds advertising on top of it, I could see some domain owners raising an issue.
Exactly… I don’t think this is going to go anywhere. Too many legal issues.
And no, this is not fair use.
I’d specialized in this stuff not long ago (couldn’t find the jobs in it though), it’s pretty much the same as Google images (from a legal standpoint).
It might go to courts, but I believe Digg would prevail in most US circuits (except for TX, which seems pretty random with its IP rulings).
Do a Google image search, you’ll see ads up top.
Overall, I’m a fan: tinyurl and mirroring with zero effort.
This is a worrying trend from the point of view of web publishers.
Say someone links you to http://digg.com/u15pp and you want to share that link. Sure you *could* copy the actual URL from the toolbar text, but isn’t it easier and more natural to copy the address in the address bar?
Now no-one knows where the URL points to (a common gripe among url shortener critics), and my site doesn’t get the link love, and I don’t get all the advertising revenue any more, and I’m at the mercy of digg; if they go down or decide to can the feature a few years from now, my inbound links don’t work! There’s more ways to exit my site (especially with the mouse hovering over the random button, it makes it that much easier to get into a “next, next, next” cycle).
What value does the diggbar add for content publishers? Well, more diggs, potentially. More traffic, potentially, if my site gets into the “random” list. Which has already turned into the “random and or sponsored” list.
Well, glad I already have a nice break out of frames script already in place: http://digg.com/u15pp
Great Prompts! I didn’t think they were ever going to stop.
hehe. I wrote them ages ago when some website was literally putting my content in an iframe on their site. I’d forgotten they were there until today.
I could have made them infinite but I figured that would just be too annoying
Nice! Your explanation helped make this entire situation more clear, actually. Thanks!
Another benefit to the bar for me is that I’m digging more stories.
I’m not one to digg something before I read it, but after I follow the link to the story, I rarely go back to hit the digg button. Now that button is in the toolbar for me.
First Kara swisher debunks your google rumors (click my name for link) – then you lift a CN post regarding the diggbar stats with no links to either Kara or CN?
http://www.cent...s-ads-pageviews
Just because Kara’s married to a Google VP does not mean her information is better than TCs. She says she doesn’t get her info from that source, and I take her at face value.
But anyone whose been around the valley long enough knows that acquisition rumors are typically based far more on truth than not.
And the volume of denials today speaks louder than anything else. If there were NOT serious conversations taking place, no one would’ve bothered responding.
Instead, the damage control squads were out in full force. From Google, because they don’t want their competitors (IE MSFT) to suddenly and urgently jump into the fray – greatly increasing the purchase price. Twitter, because they don’t want their rabid user base to turn on them before it’s a fait accompli.
Time will tell who was right, but just know that what’s said publicly and what’s done behind closed doors are often very different.
This post seems familiar to the one posted on Centernetworks yesterday?
http://tinyurl.com/cjtmkr
This was shady when About.com did it, and it’s shady now. Digg has become a bunch of filthy content thieves.
Well, guess I know what site I won’t be using anymore.
it almost worked
digg.com/http://digg.com/
it almost worked
http://digg.com...ttp://digg.com/
You think this is a good thing– this is despicable. They went from being an aggregator of content to a content thief, and the content creators url does not even sit in the address bar possibly limiting the number of links. DIGG IS DEAD!
Digg Alternatives:
http://www.ebiz...ial-bookmarking
I can’t help but think the same thing, they are hijacking urls as their own, and non savvy people will be none the wiser…
it is content theft…
It’s an idea that Polish clon of Digg.com – http://www.wykop.pl – has for almost 2 years.
We’re looking at trademark infringement and dilution, plain and simple. The last case that this happened with, it was so one sided that the site that was wrapping other sites settled with a big cash payout.
As for people saying things like “you should be greatful for all the traffic digg sends you!”
1) you’re not getting the SEO ranking anymore because digg is no longer linking to you
2) the commenters are usually morons, and the comments they leave are barely a step above myspace and youtube comments. in fact, i’d venture to say that digg commenters are probably the dumbest of the major aggregators.
3) the amount of traffic is so abusive on your servers, and every article i’ve had frontpaged usually compounds traffic as it frontpages on all the major aggregators, forums, and blogs.
4) digg traffic has very little value for publishers. the eCPM is worse than myspace traffic because most of them are using ad-block. i’m not saying we need to go on a crusade against ad-block, but because they’re not leaving meaningful comments, and they’re not clicking or even hitting impressions on ads, i have absolutely no reason to cater to them.
to handle these problems, i wrote a script so that whenever one of my pages on one of my sites gets frontpaged on any of the major aggregators, the php dumps an html file which disables a lot of things which normally load (most images, javascript, commenting for guests) and lets .htaccess handle it with modrewrite. the server abuse isn’t nearly as bad then, i still get the pittance of ad money they bring in, and they don’t leave all their comment spam all over my sites.
mjjj