It’s been almost one year to the day since I posted my article on TechConsumer about why “Web 2.0″ wasn’t enough, and how “geocontent” might just well be the next big thing.

I’ve yet to change my opinion.

During the past year I have seen many strides taken by many companies in the effort to link content to location. Google is interested; Yahoo is interested. We all know the latest iPhone will have GPS. It is no longer a question of if it will happen, but rather, the question is when will it happen. And who will be the big winner?

I’ve noticed that there are several companies trying to get their foot in the geocontent arena by hopping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Take Loopt, for example, or ByNotes. Loopt says they are connecting people and places. ByNotes looks to be a Twitter/blog/GPS mashup. But these companies are working on “Geo 2.0″ before “Geo 1.0″ has been built.

Look at how the Internet came to be. First there was nothing. Then there was a little bit of content. Then there was a boat load of content. Then there was so much content we couldn’t wade through it all. At that point, Web 2.0 suddenly made sense. We now have social networks, other humans, to help us sift through the billions of blogs to find the really good stuff (think reddit, Digg, etc.).

But the geocontent arena hasn’t hit this critical mass. We don’t have massive amounts of really good content yet. We don’t have a way for people to create interesting content around locations. Or even tie exisiting content to locations. Until this happens, geocontent 2.0 will likely take a back seat as a sparkly bobble. Something fun to look at, but not as important.

It is my prediction that someone, somewhere will come up with a very slick and easy way to tie content to a location. It will need to be easy to do with a phone or a desktop. It will need to be easy to access from a phone or a desktop. Once this happens, prepare to see an explosion of all sorts of wickedly cool apps.

Note: This article cross-posted at Chickens Don’t Have Armpits.

My new favorite crowd voting / social bookmarking site Reddit made the announcement today that it’s “open source.” This means the code for the site has been made publicly available, which could lead to crowd sourced improvements to the site as well as new sites developed using the Reddit “engine.”

Apparently, Reddit has a fairly large programmer crowd among its 4.5 million monthly visitors. So these programmers can take ideas for the site and actively participate in implementing them. And this is all done under something called the Common Public Attribution License (what Mozilla uses), which means that changes to the code must be made available publicly and any site using the code needs to make this fact obvious.

In a nutshell, Reddit used to be “improved” by five programmers but now might be improved by anyone. This is the part that gets me, the non-programmer, confused about the context of open source in this case. While I think it’s cool that anyone can create their own Reddit-like site using this code, I’m much more interested in the how new features might be implemented to the original site Reddit.

Maybe it’s just assumed that the original five person team behind Reddit will sift through any submissions and decide what’s cool and what’s not. But perhaps applying the same Reddit crowd sourcing / voting model for code submissions could be useful here?

While an open source Reddit seems like a great idea, I just wonder how exactly it will work. Or, to put it another way, how can non-programmers with ideas get involved? If anyone knows, feel free to leave a comment.

The title of this post was originally going to be “Delicious: A Review from a Late Adopter.” But that was four months ago and only a few days after I started using social bookmarking site Delicious. At the time, I found it useful even if lacking in a few areas.

But it only took a week before I went back to my old bookmarking habits with Firefox. And now I’m more excited about the latest bookmarking features in Firefox 3 (due out later this month) than the next version of Delicious, which is taking its sweet time.

The problem with Delicious (for me, at least) is that it required too much of me as a bookmarking service and didn’t provide me much as a place to find new content. The first problem could be with how I browse the web. I often find myself reading/browsing a dozen or so stories/websites at the same time. For the most part, it’s not a problem to have tons of tabs open in Firefox.

But I often get interrupted in my daily perusing and need to bookmark all the stories I’m half way through or haven’t started reading (the “Bookmark All Tabs” feature in Firefox). Although I’ve found a Firefox plugin that expedites the process of saving sites to Delicious, it’s still one site/story at a time. If I want to save a dozen at a time, I’m obviously going to revert back to Firefox rather than complete twelve separate tasks.

As for using Delicious as a way to discover new content, well, I’ve found it hard to filter out the noise and am generally uninterested in the majority of what the world is bookmarking (apparently).

What about Digg? Even if Delicious came before Digg and is popular in its own right, Digg took the Delicious concept and made it really work as a more social way to find and share new content online. But that was the Digg of what feels like a long time ago (Digg is running on its third major revision while the second version of Digg was arguably the best).

We have covered Digg issues plenty before. The site’s problems are easy to sum up in one sentence: It’s slow, bloated, outdated, gamed, policed, etc. As a result, the front page content is pretty lacking to say the least.

Now on to Reddit. While Reddit has been around for a while, I never took it seriously, always thinking of it as “Digg Light.” But it turns out that it does what Digg does but better and faster. The latest version was released recently and makes it even more accessible to the masses. I could go through all the reasons individually in detail, but I’ll just summarize: fairly interesting content, intuitive interface, and very fast response.

So there you have it. For my needs, I find bookmarking is still best handled by my browser of choice while social news and content discovery is best handled by Reddit. What do you use for bookmarking and content discovery?

TechCrunch made the announcement today that all of its blogs will have the option for you to leave video comments via a service called Seesmic. It’s a powerful idea with a dead simple execution. As a result, comments are now a mix of text and video. Take a look.

I want to be on record for saying that this could be huge despite my own personal reservations. (I’m not a fan of posting videos of myself, though perhaps I’ll be converted sooner rather than later.) The biggest real problem is that you read faster than you watch video. This is especially true for those video commenters that tend to ramble. My solution:

There should be technology in place that automatically transcribes what people say in their video comments. The transcribed comment could be right along side the thumbnail of the video. I know that, for me at least, I’d be interested in seeing the “live” context of any particularly interesting comment. But in general? I’m not about to quadruple (at a minimum) my time reading (watching) comments on the blogs I check out.

Of course, there are also the standard problems of spam and porn. And then there are new problems like general weirdness of communicating with strangers. I do it all the time in text form, but in a video? It feels like it should be reserved for sci-fi movies. It might take some getting used to before “regular” (read: non- early adopters) people are willing to do this.

But imagine the implications if this takes off. Right now, this feature from Seesmic is available as a WordPress plugin. And just like comments can now be video, the same holds true for blog posts. Imagine then, what would happen, if this got implemented on a site like USA Today (an early adopter of comments, at least out of the traditional media group) or the New York Times.

And what about social sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot? Could video comments work in these communities? Is the TechCrunch implementation the beginning of video taking over content on the Internet? Or is it just an isolated incident?

TechConsumer has had its fair share of Digg coverage lately. But for those of us who remember what Digg was back in the glory days, we can’t help but draw attention to its flaws in the here and now.

First, we had our April 1st interview with Digg’s founders discussing priorities and progress and how Digg is just a game. Second, we discussed the Digg paradox and how getting rid of the editor/gatekeeper just creates new gatekeepers.

But today’s topic, for me at least, feels like the most interesting twist on the story of where Digg started as compared to what Digg has become:

Digg is based on an algorithm that makes sure a certain “diversity of diggers” threshhold is met before a story makes it to the front page. So even though Digg has a friend system with “shouts” for sharing stories, if used, it doesn’t necessarily help any story you’re sharing get to the front page. What you really need are diggs from users you don’t know (if your goal is to bring maximum awareness to a story or submission).

So how do you get people you don’t know to be interested in what you are interested in? Well, what Digg hopes is that this is intrinsic to your submission. Meaning, if what you are submitting to Digg is really interesting, lots of people you don’t know will be interested and push it to the front page.

But Digg is so huge now with ten thousand submissions every day. As a result, Digg’s upcoming queue–where all new stories sit for up to 24 hours–moves quickly and is difficult to sift through. This means that even if your submission is interesting, you can’t rely on the Digg site itself as a mechanism for other diggers you don’t know to find the story you submitted.

So now we’re back to the same question: How do you get people you don’t know to digg your [assumed to be interesting] submissions? The easiest way, I’ve found, is to submit only content from sites that have a) a huge audience and b) Digg tools integrated (buttons on the story itself that show if it’s been dugg and how many diggs).

These sites are generally so well known that they have plenty of readers that make for the perfect storm for getting content to the Digg front page. That is, readers that are Digg users but aren’t friends with each other. Let’s take a look at an example that illustrates how this works:

Yesterday, TechConsumer had an article in the upcoming queue with over 100 diggs (see image below):

Right around the same time the above screenshot was taken, this story from Gizmodo (image below) hit the front page with 33 diggs:

About a half hour later, I noticed something even more interesting and decided to take a screenshot (see below). I was browsing the front page of Digg and realized that the top six stories on the page all had less diggs than the TechConsumer story that never made it. All these submissions were from major websites (BBC, Yahoo News, Gizmodo, New York Times).

In fact, you’ll notice that it took the previously mentioned Gizmodo story 30 minutes of being on the front page to accrue the same number of diggs as the TechConsumer story that never made it.

So what does this mean? For one, I can tell you that the TechConsumer readership doesn’t even come close to any of these sites. And, as a result, any readership and Digg user overlap is much more likely to be by Digg users who know each other (i.e., are friends on Digg). This is likely to be the case for any smaller site.

More importantly, though, this means that Digg favors traffic heavy sites. The irony being that Digg’s “diversity” algorithm does exactly the opposite of diversifying: It keeps the majority of front page stories coming from a small group of traffic heavy sites.

And for your double dose of irony today, this makes Digg closer to Yahoo Buzz. Yahoo Buzz is described as “a Digg-like site that takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 to start) and let’s users vote on stories and push them up to the top of the page.”

It should be noted that how Digg works currently isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just no longer a model that follows what Digg itself claims to be. In fact, Digg should really update its “About Us” page. Here is what the first two sentences say:

“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.”

It’s obviously not that simple.

From my experience, Digg is turning more into a place to see what is popular in the mainstream yesterday (since it takes nearly a day for many stories to hit the front page). Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but that kind of information (i.e., “mainstream yesterday”) seems to be available all over the place nowadays…

When I first heard about Digg I was quite excited. Digg is a site where you can submit articles, pictures, or other content that you think is interesting. If other people like the story they can “digg it,” and it pushes the story to the top. The content on the front page only contains articles with a lot of diggs.

What appealed to me is that you don’t have a “gatekeeper.” You can submit content to Slashdot, but there is a group of editors who have been hired to sift through stories, find the good ones, and ultimately determine what makes it to the front page. When you have gatekeepers, you will have bias. If they are not interested in a certain topic, you’re out of luck. If a thousand people are interested in a topic, but the editor isn’t, you’re out of luck.

With Digg, this isn’t a problem. It’s democracy in its purest form.

Which leads to the problem.

Let’s look at an example. This article about Yahoo rejecting a Microsoft bid was submitted to Digg 59 days ago. You can’t tell by the time any longer, but it was submitted several hours before this article, about the same topic. The latter article was the one which ultimately made it to the front page.

I see four problems with this scenario.

First, although the one article was submitted first, ultimately it was the second submitted article that made it to the front page. Not a big deal, but it starts to raise a red flag. Why did the second article make it, even though the first article had several more hours to collect diggs? The Digg submissions were linking to different articles on the same topic – maybe the article that made it to the front page was of higher quality?

Which leads us to the second problem. The article that made it to the front page can be found here. It is three sentences long. The rest of the page seems to be nothing but ads, ads, and more ads. The article that didn’t make it can be found here. In my opinion, the article that didn’t make it is superior because it links to outside sources, is clear and concise, and goes into depth. So it can be argued that the article submitted later, which made it to the front page, is of lower quality.

The third problem is that of duplicate articles fighting to get to the front page. The article that didn’t make it got 95 diggs. Anybody who has submitted articles to Digg knows that it can take a long time to get that many diggs. If you have 5-10 articles on the same topic, and they are all getting dugg, a “breaking story” might not make it to the front page for some time because the votes are being spread over a number of articles.

Finally, what I ultimately see as the biggest problem of Digg takes us back to the “gatekeeper” issue. My initial excitement over Digg was the removal of this gatekeeper. If a story is good, it will make it to the front page. But this example shows me that this might not be happening. Instead, what I’m seeing is a group of submitters who have risen to the top and now have a better chance of getting material to the front page. In fact, we’ve ended right back where we began, with a group of gatekeepers. But it’s worse than that.

Often these power diggers seem to push their own site or maybe a site with which they have an existing relationship. Otherwise, why the low quality submissions? Minimal content or stories are copied from others sites and then combined with tons of ads on a new site (as is the case in our example). In other words, these gatekeepers now aren’t pushing material they think is interesting. Rather, they seem to be pushing whatever reused content is on a predefined set of sites with which they are likely to have a relationship. Conflict of interest in its purest sense.

So, in the end, we’re left in the same situation as we were before, except the gatekeepers aren’t paid employees who must demonstrate competence in their job or risk being fired, but people who are pimping unoriginal, copied content – likely for personal gains. There will always be bias in these “gatekeepers,” but blatant bias can be dealt with in the first model, not as much in the second.

There has been a lot of talk about Digg vs. Slashdot (which uses paid gatekeepers). In my mind, there is little comparison. Slashdot is not a perfect model, but Digg is even less so.

So, if you want pictures of cute puppies, stories about topless women, and random interesting tech articles posted as a copy of a copy on somebody’s personal website (that you can see after you’ve closed all the popup ads), then keep digging away. If you’re looking for something a bit meatier, I recommend Slashdot or any of the other “traditional model” sites.

For more on issues with Digg, albeit addressed in a different way, see this article.

Marion Jensen

When you do things in a crowd with no organization, no plan, and no clear leaders, chaos is usually the end result. And then sometimes the opposite occurs.

A few weeks ago there was a post on digg about being rickrolled. If you are not familiar with what a rickroll is, you can read about this most interesting phenomenon here. Haha! No you can’t. That was actually an example of being rickrolled. You can really read about it here.

Ok, I’ll stop, I promise. The real article is here. Basically what happens when you get rickrolled is somebody posts a real response or comment to a discussion at hand, and then says something like, “you can find more information on this topic here.” They post a link and when you go “there,” you discover this dancing boy from the 80s. Don’t think that’s hilarious? Then you’re an old fogy.

Anyway, back to mob organization. A person posted about this phenomenon on digg. An unusual thing happened in the comments section. The first comment was somebody making a funny joke. The second comment was somebody who posted the first line of the song. The third person posted the next part of the song. And what happens next was very interesting.

Everybody who posted the next line of the song got “dugg up.” Meaning their comments were displayed. Everybody else who made a comment other than the next line of the song, got “dugg down.” By hundreds of people! There comments were buried (not displayed), and you were left with the lyrics of the song.

Nobody said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea, let’s try this…” It just happened. Hundreds of people just started all doing the same thing, and order sprung from chaos.

So, there you have it. Your daily dose of chaos theory. And speaking of chaos theory, if you want to read a great primer on this very interesting and applicable theory, you definitely should check out this site.

Or better yet, this is a fascinating site in order springing from chaos. You can get to the good stuff by jumping right to this page.

Digg has had its fair share of criticism. But the idea that it’s slow, bloated, outdated, gamed, and policed has all been hearsay. But now, in an exclusive interview with TechConsumer, Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson share openly what’s been going on behind the scenes. Here’s a transcript of the interview:

Caswell: Greetings, gentlemen, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule for this interview. I wanted to started by asking the following question: What exactly do you do there at Digg?

Rose: I’ll take this one. What people sometimes forget is all the brainstorming that goes on before an idea can be made into a reality.

Caswell: So you brainstorm most days?

Rose: Well, my title is Chief Architect.

Caswell: So what have you brainstormed in the past versus the brainstorming that you’re working on now?

Rose: The best example of my brainstorming in the past is the concept behind Digg, that is, user-submitted stories. My current brainstorming is focused on what to do to prevent my original idea from getting copied and done better by other sites. Luckily, Digg has enough of a following that it’s not too big of a deal if we take as long as we need to figure this out while our competitors move forward. For some reason, we still get tons of traffic.

Caswell: So what’s the underlying purpose of Digg? Would you say it’s to facilitate a democratic way for people to find interesting things on the Internet?

Adelson: Well, yes and no. That’s the beauty of Digg, actually. You see, on the surface it sure feels democratic. I mean, when you first visit the site, you’d have no idea of all the complexity behind the algorithm that determines what’s popular. You just see the way diggs accumulate, one per person, and assume it’s a democratic way for stories to be voted to the front page of Digg.

Caswell: So are you saying it’s not democratic?

Rose: Think of it more as a game, that is, a game where the more you play, the better you are at winning. In the case of Digg, winning is getting content on the front page. But since so many people want to win, it would be too easy if the amount of diggs were the only factor.

Caswell: You’re talking about “gaming,” right?

Rose: Exactly. What fun is playing a game if it’s that simple?

Caswell: Oh, I meant more the idea that… never mind, tell me more.

Rose: That’s why there has to be a secret algorithm that everyone tries to deduce in order to win. It’s not just the number of diggs, but things like frequency, location, friends, etc. And what’s even better is that you can’t win the game in the same way too many times. The community can permanently bury certain sites if they are used too much in the game.

Adelson: And certain diggs can be worth less depending on patterns.

Caswell: But what about sites like Ars Technica or Engadget? Can they get buried in the same way as other sites? They seem to be used as a way to win all the time.

Adelson: Well, it’s true that Engadget in particular often has a snarky one paragraph description of a story with a link to the real story. But these frequently make the front page of Digg for a reason. You see, I don’t normally talk about this aspect of the algorithm, but you should know that it’s rigged to favor snarkiness found in unoriginal content. We feel this best reflects the tone of the Digg community overall: a place with no original content that is instead full of snarkiness.

Caswell: Fascinating insight, thank you. Shifting gears for a minute, I wanted to talk about one more thing before we wrap up. Does it bother you that sites like TechCrunch only seem to give you press when pointing out how your competitors are doing more to innovate in less time (such as creating groups, a news clustering feature, private mail, breaking news faster, etc.)?

Rose: Not at all, I mean, we’re hard at work on the important things. Do other sites have the same level of widgets, gadgets, and visualization tools? Those other sites simply prioritize in a different way that we don’t think is as effective.

Caswell: That really makes sense. Listen, thanks to both of you for a great interview.

Adelson: Thanks for having us.

Rose: Talk to you later.

In related news, Google and Virgin team up to put human settlement on Mars while TechCrunch sues Facebook for $25 Million in statutory damages.

Paul’s Soapbox is a regular feature of TechConsumer where I sound off on various tech topics/products that I’m interested in (or hate). This is just my $.02, so consider yourself warned. This week’s subjects? Vista, Mario, and Kevin Rose…

For all the Vista users out there, I recently stumbled across an awesome program for the Vista Sidebar. It is called Amnesty Generator, and basically it will take the code for any web widget (think Google Gadgets, ESPN, etc) and turn it into a Vista Sidebar compatible gadget. It is a simple program, but works great; I use it to display the NBA.com live sports scores on my desktop. Check it out. There is also a Mac OS X version, but I have not used it.

Next up on the block is Nintendo’s forthcoming Mario Kart release for the Wii. Forget Zelda or Metroid, Mario Kart may be the most important franchise Nintendo has made in the last decade or two. All three people Everyone who had a N64 or Gamecube had Mario Kart; it is probably the only game I really played on Gamecube. It single handedly kept Nintendo in the console business, IMHO.

The formula is simple, easy and fun racing antics for you and your friends. Really it is about playing with others and yelling at them when they use a power-up on you. “Damn you Carl! That was the luckiest turtle shell ever!” The problem is that Mario Kart for Wii will not have voice support for online play (of course you can still taunt in person ).

Maybe it is just me, but I don’t get it. Why doesn’t Nintendo come out with a headset for the Wii (it uses Bluetooth after all)? They made a steering wheel for Mario Kart, and I would think that another accessory to buy would fit perfect with Nintendo’s current accessory fetish strategy.

Mario Kart online won’t be half of the fun it could be with voice support. I understand that they may be concerned about the unwanted jagged words you often hear on Xbox Live, but limiting voice chat to friends-only by default would take care of that. When I read posts like this of people using Xbox 360s to do voice chat while they play Wii games, you know something is wrong.

Lastly, and certainly not least, why do people care what Kevin Rose says or does? (This is a real question, feel free to comment). I know he runs a website that is almost as popular as TechConsumer (ha!), but really, why do people care? It was the Kevin Rose 3G iPhone rumors post about back-to-back webcams that really pushed me over the edge. It got coverage on AppleInsider, Gizmodo, Techmeme, and of course Digg.

Kevin Rose has had one good idea in his life so far (which appears to be easy to copy and make better), and that’s it. Digg initially thrived under the so-called “wisdom of crowds” but it is now languishing under “mob rule.” Interestingly enough, the mob has a fancy for Paris Hilton, all products from Apple, and stupid ugly cats (and squirrels). More people on Digg read what Kevin Rose says than what Ben Bernanke says (even with this “recession”). Rose’s predictions were way off on the iPhone 1.0, so why would I listen to him now? He doesn’t work with or for Apple (actually his business relationship is closer with Microsoft).

So again I ask, why does anyone listen to Kevin Rose? If you can actually give me a good reason why, I’ll be surprised.

Note: This article is cross-posted at PseudoSavant.

For some time now the social news and media arena has chided users for expressing their opinions. Sites such as Digg and Slashdot say they just want links to the news stories, not links back to the blog where you posted your opinion or review of the story. In essence, they want to be the comment thread from the originating article.

But a new type of social media is emerging. The funny thing is that it is happening on the iPhone right along with the desktop and laptop computers. Why? It is simple, fast, and focused on your opinion. Sites like Floort.com allow users to express their opinions on politics, religion, technology or a variety of other topics. Other users then respond with opinions of their own. This has at least two viable markets that have yet to be cornered:

1. Social media for mobile users. Videos and images are too bandwidth-intensive for rapid use of mobile users. It the time it takes to watch one Youtube video. An iPhone user instead could view a dozen Floorts and respond to them. This is symbolic of the rapid mind switching that modern mobile professionals perform. They prefer quick, short bursts of information to 3-5 minutes worth of one topic.
2. Commercial opinions. Someone posts a Floort about preferring Alienware to HP computers for gaming. A discussion ensues. The fact that the user posted a debatable opinion stimulates the conversation. If both HP and Alienware are monitoring the threads via RSS (yes, Floort has that) then they receive valuable information about consumer preferences straight from the field. This is far more valuable than any focus group. This is raw opinion and feelings.

While providing a link is an option, it is not required and most users don’t bother. Users can become fans of other users and track just the Floorts of that user. It is a simple, self-correcting mechanism for filtering garbage.

The future is always uncertain, but this trend towards short bursts of information seems to be here for the next go-around. It will be interesting to see how this develops.