A good read and a discussion I’ll be sure to follow.

For an example of what the DiggBar looks like, here is an example of a page here on First initial, last name that has been getting a few hundred views per day with the DiggBar.

But wait, there’s more. The DiggBar, as you can see from the example URL I gave, also acts as a way to shorten a URL. You can read some of my general thoughts about URL shorteners here. This makes it easy for people to share these DiggBar-wrapped URLs on sites like Twitter (I’m cdevroe, btw).

Why block the DiggBar?

Because the DiggBar is the devil!! No, not really. But there are some legitimate reasons to block, or boycott, the DiggBar in favor of the team at Digg changing the way it is implemented. You see, the same caveats that apply to other URL shortening services also apply to Digg. Such as link rot (or links expiring). On top of those reasons, though, is the fact that they are wrapping the Dugg URL with the DiggBar. Some may not like that. Worse, however, is that the location in the browser does not change as it would with traditional URL shortening services. This is bad practice for a number of reasons. First, although Digg would argue that they’ve “taken this into consideration”, is the way search engines index the URL. If the URL for these indexed pages all resulted in having Digg.com/* in them, Digg would be getting a lot of “Google juice” that really wasn’t meant for them. That credit should be going to the original URL but instead it’d be going to Digg. Digg says that they’ve addressed this problem but, as some have pointed out, they didn’t do this correctly.

The URL not changing also has an affect on the human interface. When people browse the Web they generally believe that the address in the location bar on their browser is the location that they are currently browsing on the Internet. If my browser says I’m browsing Amazon.com then I’m probably browsing Amazon.com. The DiggBar goes directly against this convention. Even though your browser reads digg.com/whatever it does not mean that you are on Digg.com. To make matters worse, if you’re going through your browser’s history – you know, to get back to that tutorial that you read earlier today about how to soften butter correctly – you will be presented with a Digg URL rather than the canonical URL (or, the established URL for a piece of content, the real one). This is just bad form. Other URL shortening services do not even show up in my browser’s history.

In other words, the current implementation of the DiggBar brings with it a whole new set of problems that adversely affects both the sites that Digg links to and the people that are browsing those sites.

Why I’m not blocking the DiggBar

With all of this hoopla about how bad the DiggBar’s implementation is you might think that I’d be one of the first people to block it. John Gruber, who is kicking and screaming about the DiggBar as much as anyone, has chronicled the goings-on with the DiggBar over the last week. Searching through his coverage, which is sort of hard since his search results are a bit odd, will reveal a wide array of ways to block the DiggBar fairly easily. But I think I’ll wait on blocking the DiggBar just yet, and here is why.

I’ve met Kevin (who founded Digg and is the lead guy behind many of their products), know some of the people at Digg (or did, not sure if they are still there), and am generally a fan of what Digg is trying to do as a site and with the DiggBar. John’s all out assault on Digg’s audience, in my opinion, isn’t really fair. I’m just as much against trolls on Digg as anyone but not everyone that uses Digg is a douche. I also do not believe that Digg’s intentions were all bad when they released the DiggBar. Could they have done a better job? Yes. Could they have leaked it out to more testers that are more sensitive to the adverse affects it may cause? Yes. But Digg has misstepped before and, as far as I’ve seen, done a fairly good job of listening to community feedback and adjusting. I hope they do the same thing with the DiggBar.

If they don’t, then I’ll block it.

Update: It looks like the first wave of changes to the DiggBar are planned and being released this week. Digg will allow members to opt out while non-members, or those not currently logged in, won’t see it at all. A fantastic first step in my opinion.

Some deal with this issue from an ideological perspective in that they disable comments because they feel that people will behave differently when commenting than they would if they wrote from their own Web sites. Jeremy Keith recently said:

“Choose a random video on YouTube or a random story on Digg, read each and every comment and then tell me that the comments contribute to any kind of community discussion. They are shining examples of antisocial networking.” — Reflection

I feel this is a blanket statement, which has some validity, but I do not believe that YouTube or Digg comments are completely “examples of antisocial networking”.

Sure. Many comments found on Digg threads are a bunch of teenaged boys (the proof is in the statistics) yelling back and forth about whether or not that specific article is digg worthy – but I believe those threads are there exactly for that reason. Should the commentary on Digg be about the article itself? Or should that conversation be reserved for the article’s origin? I believe it is up to the community to decide and it seems like they have.

Not that Jeremy’s point isn’t a valid one. Someone leaving a comment on my blog may indeed be a little looser with their speech than they would if they were responding, like I am right now, from their own Web sites. And if the author of the site is not willing to weed through the comments – then perhaps it is best to disable the comments for that very reason.

But I believe there is a completely different angle to consider.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site. It is always nice when someone writes a blog post in response to something you said or wrote and have them link to your site or post as a way to direct people to the rest of the conversation. I’ve been fortunate to have a fair amount of people doing that very thing with some of my posts here on my personal site – and everytime I enjoy it when they do. I wonder, if I disabled comments, would the number of “linkbacks” increase because I was no longer providing a way for the conversation to continue on this site?

In the spring of 2004 I published a poorly written post entitled: “Disabling Comments, The Pros” wherein I spoke about a few sites that were good examples of this “theory” at work. Some of the most popular personal weblogs to date have been those who rarely, if at all, enable comments on their posts. I don’t believe this to be “the formula for creating a popular personal blog” but I believe it may help in some cases.

I leave comments enabled because I suppose I’m not as strict as Jeremy. I don’t care if my readers (all 11 of you) comment in a little different form than they would if they had written an entire response on their sites. So I guess I’m willing to moderate, though I very rarely do, in order to keep the conversation somewhat centralized.

What do you think? Have you ever considered turning off comments? Why? You may answer in the comment form below.

This morning I was, finally, able to begin uploading some video from WordCamp onto Viddler. I noticed I was having a few hiccups while doing so, but wasn’t sure where the problem was; between my computer, the Internet connection, and Viddler itself. Turns out, Viddler is now being used by Download.com. Combine that with the amount of traffic we’ve been seeing lately, and with a few of our videos ending up on Lifehacker, Digg, and a few other popular destinations lately – and you can see why our network is being put to the test. But these are good problems…

Today I’m meeting with the CFO of Opera to discuss some things about community. The My Opera Community has recently surged passed 900,000 users – so congratulations to their team.

Between work, play, San Francisco, trying to be a tourist, meetings, and the traffic issues – today has been pretty crazy.

How is your day going?

So here are mine and remember, these are not predictions – just some services I wouldn’t mind disappearing.

• Digg is simply annoying. The editorial process is no longer very valid and some of its features are definitely abused. I still use the service from time to time but I’d like to see a competitor come along that does a much better job.
• MySpace (which also made Paul’s list) is just horrible to use. I find it incredibly ironic that one of the hardest sites to use is also one of the most popular and used by the most inexperienced of Internet users. Again, I’d love to see a few of its competitors get a big break.
• Basecamp is one of the more popular “project management” applications (especially in my industry). I really do not like this application and I am sometimes forced to use it. I think the application is built and designed well, it is simply not built for the way I think.

Again, I do not foresee any of these services disappearing this year (even though some have predicted the downfall of Digg).

Do you have three services that you either have to use or would love to use but you simply would like to see them improved, replaced, or just “die” in 2007?

[tags]digg, myspace, basecamp, web 2.0, death list, paul scrivens, wisdump[/tags]
[slug]web20-deathlist07[/slug]

Lesson learned.

Update: The site is back up, thanks to John K. and helping me get some caching setup.

[tags]tug, digg, theubergeeks[/tags]