In a letter to book publishers, Digg product manager Mike Cieri announced that the troubled social news website will no longer accept content submitted via RSS.
The ability for book publishers to submit all of their stories to Digg automatically using an RSS feed seemed like an efficient way to open up a firehose of content for Digg. However, Cieri says this idea had unintended consequences.
According to Cieri, “Most RSS-submitted content is not performing well on Digg.” He says the site’s analytics show that only a mere 4.5% of Digg’s “Top News” content comes from the RSS submissions. He adds that the ability to submit an RSS feed to Digg “has been heavily abused by spammers and has been a constant drain on our technical resources to identify and fight off spam content.” Cieri praised the manual method of submitting stories to Digg, saying that manual submissions “ensure that quality content appears on Digg.”
With this move, the site takes yet another step back toward the old version 3.0, the site design that was in use before radical changes resulted in a user revolt and a 24% decline in U.S. visitors in the first 11 weeks. In response, Digg has slowly added back features that readers missed, such as the ability to bury stories, andlast month’s overhaul that included the return of user profiles and story statistics. Since that first fateful redesign last summer, Digg has laid off more than a third of its staffers.
I’m just wondering why Digg stubbornly refused to modify its obviously unpopular redesign after it became apparent that it was resulting in large percentages of its readership turning away. After a few days of this, why didn’t Digg simply revert to the old version and its rules that seemed to be working pretty well? If not a few days later, why not a month later?
Here’s the full text of the letter we received from Digg product manager Mike Cieri:
Publishers,
We hope this message finds you well. After a bumpy second half of 2010 at Digg, we are starting to see positive signs of improvement and are optimistic about the direction Digg is headed. In January 2011, we saw double digit growth of diggs and comments, as well as an increase in unique visitors and exit clicks out to publisher sites. We’ve taken a number of concrete steps to stay better connected with the Digg community, and we are taking action to improve Digg based on our community’s feedback. One important point of feedback we’ve heard is that RSS submitted stories are hurting Digg in a number of ways, and in the next week we are going to discontinue the ability to submit content via RSS. We’d like to share the reasoning behind the decision, and let you know what you can do to improve your performance on Digg.
Put very simply, most RSS submitted content is not performing well on Digg. For many of our users, RSS submissions take the fun out of finding and submitting great content. When users try to submit a story to Digg and find that the story has already been auto-submitted via RSS, they lose interest in helping spread the story on Digg by commenting and sharing with friends. Removing a user’s desire to champion a story results in less diggs, comments, exit clicks, and ultimately a much smaller chance of making the Top News section. Our analytics reflect this point – only 4.5% of all Top News content comes from RSS submitted content (95.5% is manually submitted).
At its core, Digg is a community of passionate users who take pride in the content they submit and engage with one another in discussion and promotion of viral content. There is a perception that some publishers don’t participate in the community, use RSS submit as an “auto-pilot” tool to submit content without discretion, and do little to promote submitted content o
Richard Branson’s Virgin Digital Book Publishing company on Tuesday launched “Project,” a digital lifestyle magazine, exclusively for distribution on the Apple iPad.
The magazine, which will reportedly feature multimedia content, will be priced at US$2.99 an issue.
This is the second digital magazine created exclusively for the iPad announced by a major company; the first was “The Daily,” from News Corp. (Nasdaq: NWS), which is scheduled to be launched next year.
Will Virgin’s endorsement of the iPad as a publishing platform undermine publishers’ consortium Next Issue Media, which is trying to squeeze Apple by launching a digital newsstand on the Android platform early next year?
The Book Publishing Project Has Landed
“Project” was created jointly by Virgin Group and UK multimedia book publisher Seven Squared. It’s a monthly magazine that will change as often as minute-by-minute to give readers up-to-date news.
The publication is based around design, entertainment, technology and entrepreneurs. It will have its own staff, and it will also encourage contributions from the public.
“Project” is edited by Anthony Noguera, formerly editorial director of men’s lifestyle magazines at H. Bauer, the largest privately owned publisher in Europe. The publication’s art director is Che Storey, formerly of Arena and Men’s Health magazines.
The cover story for the first issue focuses on Jeff Bridges. Other subjects include Yamauchi Kazanori, the developer behind the “Gran Turismo” game series.
“Project” claims to have landed top-flight advertisers, including Lexus, American Express (NYSE: AXP), Panasonic, Ford UK and Ford Canada.
Readers Heart Digital
Consumers apparently love their tablets — an online survey of more than 1,800 consumers conducted by Harrison Group and Zinio in September found that 13 percent of consumers are interested in buying a tablet-based device within the next 12 months.
The survey also found that 55 percent of tablet and e-reader owners who read digital content are consuming more digital content than they expected, and that 33 percent are spending more on buying digital content.
That led the Harrison Group to forecast sales of more than 20 million tablets and e-readers next year.
“This is a continuation of the trend in that you’ve got a whole host of devices that are receptacles for Internet-based content,” Frank Dickson, a vice president of research at In-Stat, told MacNewsWorld. “You’re seeing reconfiguring of content, which is already in digital form for another medium, whether it’s the iPad, the Nook, the Kindle or the smartphone,” he added.
“Before the iPad, book publishers tended to think they had to choose whether consumers wanted to read content in print or in digital format,” Jeanniey Mullen, a spokesperson for Zinio, told MacNewsWorld. “Now they’re finding people may love print, but they want digital access as well so they can take their digital device with them and read on the go.”
The Agony and the Ecstasy of the iPad
The iPad has forced the publishing industry to take digital media seriously, Mullen said.
“When the iPad came out in April, it was the first time that the publishing industry began committing design and strategic resources to building up digital readership,” Mullen explained.
Strong consumer demand has made the iPad the spea
The long ordeal of the 33 trapped Chilean miners is finally at an end – and the buzz about book deals and film rights to the men’s dramatic story has already begun.
The miners themselves are reported to have made a pact to collaborate on their own book, but in the UK the first book was signed up on Monday, before the rescue had even begun. Freelance journalist Jonathan Franklin, who has covered the dramatic story for the Guardian from day one, is to pen an account of the saga, provisionally titled 33 Men, for book publisher Transworld.
Franklin, who is an American but has lived in the Chile’s capital Santiago for 15 years, spoke about the book on his mobile phone from Chile, after 48 sleepless hours covering the emotional scenes as the miners emerged.
“This is one of the great rescue stories of all time,” he said, admitting he himself had wept as the first miners were released on Tuesday night. “It’s the reason we all want to be reporters: a remarkable story of the world coming together for a good reason. It taps into human altruism, the desire to work together, perseverance, faith that good things happen, never giving up.” The early chapters of the book, he said, were already written.
As a journalist, Franklin had had “a backstage pass to the whole thing. I was allowed to tape record the psychologist talking to the [trapped] men, I spent last night in the hospital talking to the [newly freed] miners.” He intends his book to reveal the characters of the miners themselves (“You could probably do a book on every one of them”) and reflect their black humour: one of the men played dead, for a joke, during the first 17 days spent in the collapsed mine without food, while another attempted phone sex with the nurse who was attending to him 700m above.
Transworld book publishers, a division of Random House, which bought 33 Men at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, said: “As far as I’m aware, Franklin is the only print and publishers journalist in the inner circle at the mine, party to a lot of the strategy and to the stories of the relatives at the top, the wives and girlfriends.” He added: “What I think is really interesting, apart from the drama of the story itself, is the miners’ lives in this isolated outpost in Chile, which is a bit like the Wild West. People seem to live by their own rules, and it’s a very rugged existence – tough people living in a tough place.”
The publication date for the book is still to be confirmed. “It’ll be sooner rather than later, but I don’t want Franklin to compromise the depth and breadth of the story by making it a rush job,” Scott-Kerr said.
Literary agent Annabel Merullo at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, who is handling the book, said it had also sold to France and Germany, with self publishing film interest from the US.
“It’s happened so quickly,” she said. “When the story broke, we talked about it at the agency and said, ‘Is there a book in it?’ We decided there only was if we could get someone really good to write it. Jonathan’s coverage was so much better than everyone else’s. He has incredible access at the mines and he’s covered the story from day one.”
