I’ve been wary of Digg for a while. While I do enjoy using it to track what’s happening on the Interwebs, the comments have become so overwhelmingly troll-ridden that I can’t even stand participating in discussions. They’re supposed to be a “user-driven” site, but now the Internet-at-large is beginning to wonder just what role the editors of the site really do have. Allow me to point you to an article at ForeverGeek, which lays out some interesting theories about how things make it to the front page, and how other stories are almost instantly banned:

What really caught my eye with the situation was the sequence of diggs. On the bottom it notes who has dugg an article, and it lists them in order. Confounding as it was, the two beforementioned stories had the same sixteen people digg the story in a row. So the 7th digger of one article (Insomn1a) was the 7th digger of the other article. In fact, removing bribera’s digg of one article showed that the first nineteen diggs of each article were identical. What made this really interesting was that the 17th digger was none other than Kevin Rose, aka celebrated creator and founder of Digg. I’ve read that Digg gets anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 readers a day. 16 (or 19) identical diggs for two articles by the same author? 22 of the first 24 diggers being being the same for both articles? Somehow I don’t think that is a coincidence.

There is a tinge of “conspiracy-theory” here, but I’m prepared to put on my tintoil hat. The evidence does not look good for Digg. The site has a great idea going for it, and I sure hope that it doesn’t have dubious means for pumping up links to the front page, or for killing entires that dare question their practices.

Related:

Dig on Digg on the BOL forums.

Digg corrupted? Forever Geek makes the case from Guardian Unlimited

Digging up dirt from Ryan’s blog

Response from Kevin Rose 

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I’m going to be on the excellent PC Gamer podcast tomorrow, talking about women and video games. Well, we’ll probably fall into a long discussion on WoW, but I’m totally ok with that. You should listen, it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Also, sorry about the relative silence of my blog this week. Things have been really insane at work with the launching of CNET TV. Expect to see a lot of good stuff coming soon! I knew there was a good reason for buying that TiVo…

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Matt S. sent me a link to Google Calendar, and so far it’s pretty much exactly what I was expecting. The interface is clean and neat, just like Gmail. When you want to add an event on the calendar, a bubble pops in the time slot that you select; then, you can add more information as needed. I can’t figure out if it plays nice with other calendars (Outlook, iCal, etc), but for someone who works in a corporate environment (where nothing that syncs with your Outlook is really private) I don’t mind having my personal calendar completely separate. But it would be nice to have the option.

So far it seems to have nice collaboration abilities (adding guests to events who can make changes, sharing calendars), so this will definitely be a useful tool for a lot of people. I was also just thinking that it would be really neat if they opened up the API so that if you were on an event page, you could easily click some kind of “Add this event to my Google Calendar,” and it would do so automatically. Just like adding a del.icio.us link to your bookmark page. I’m going to play around with this for a while, but it looks like a very sweet deal so far.

UPDATE: WOW! The Quick Add feature is amazing. You can type in something like “lunch with lara at noon tomorrow” and it will add your lunch date in the appropriate time slot. That’s really freaking cool. Has import features in iCal or CSV (MS Outlook) format, but you can’t export the calendar out to a device (Ryan - “why don’t they realize that a calendar is the most important when you have it WITH YOU?”) Good point. I’m sure someone will figure something out for that rather quickly.

UPDATE 2: We found the place where you can export your calendars address for another application, under Calendar Details -> Private Address. Fantastic.

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Phillip Torrone wrote a post on Metroblogging SF about laptop thieves hitting SF. The two articles it links to are very scary. I can understand getting your laptop jacked if you leave it and go to the bathroom, but getting STABBED as you sit there in a coffee shop?! That’s really insane. The only thing I can think to deter thieves is to lock your laptop to the table or something. If they can see that it’s not going anywhere, then maybe they won’t make an attempt to steal it. Be careful out there!

Update: News.com has an article about what you can do to protect your laptop.

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