happy halloween

Long-time redditor, Adam Fuhrer, sent over this over.

We've evidently got a mole in digg, a pumpkin-carving reddit sympathizer. That, or it was going to be used for smashing.

Either way, I think it had a good chance of winning the digg pumpkin carving contest. Kevin booed the reddit alien, but that's OK; I know he's going out dressed as it this year.

the reddit alien eats xckd's multi-colored poo

Here's the proof. A response to this recent XKCD comic.

digg is developing their own /recommended page

The Guardian's Zoe Margolis tracked down Kevin Rose before a Diggnation meetup for a quick interview. In it, he reveals some interesting work digg is doing for their next release:

We're creating algorithms that take a look at what you've dug and compare it to other people, inside the system, in real time. We have this working on our staging servers right now - it's not something that we've launched publicly - but essentially, when you Digg an item you're agreeing with that item and all those other people who dug it. So let's say you're Digg number 4,000 on something: who are those other 3,999 people you agreed with? What we're doing with the math behind the scenes is we're saying 'OK, you agree with all these other people, what else are they finding out there that you might like? That you might also find interesting? So we're working on ways to surface those stories - to find quality content before it becomes popular - but also introduce you to new people based on what you've been Digging."

We've been tweaking our recommendations page for over the last two years and come to realize that serving real-time accurate recommendations is not a trivial task, so I'm quite curious to see what KR and co. have come up with.

Granted, their development team is more than an order of magnitude larger than ours -- they've got the brain quantity to pull off something cool.

digg punked me for trademark infringement

Back when that whole "Twitter" thing started taking off, I promptly registered the usernames "reddit" and "digg." Both accounts were idle for quite some time because I frankly didn't think Twitter was worth using (I still don't quite get it, despite all of Scoble's declarations to the contrary).

A couple weeks ago, I was directed to twitterfeed, a nifty site that seamlessly plugs an RSS feed into Twitter. So I did what any reasonable person who owned those 2 twitter accounts would do, I plugged the reddit rss feed into "reddit" and the digg rss feed into "digg."

Quite a few friends emailed me about why I, a co-founder of reddit, would do a such a thing. I didn't see the problem. If people want to use reddit, they will. If they want to use digg, they will. Google and Yahoo still co-exist.

So my digg Twitter account was happily twittering along until this morning. Here's the email I received:

Hi There,


We've received a note from Digg regarding your Twitter account. It has come to our attention that your Twitter account:


http://twitter.com/digg


is in violation of our Terms of Service, specifically article 6 of the General Conditions, which mentions trademark infringement:


6. We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.


To settle this issue we've changed the user name to "Digg_News" in the full name and user name fields in order to eliminate confusion. You can change your user name to something else if you'd like, but please honor the Terms of Service accordingly:


1. Visit Twitter.com/settings

2. Edit the Full Name and Username fields

3. Click "Save"


We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.


Thanks!

I guess this is the part of the blog where I'm supposed to rail against "the man," but I just don't care enough.

I'll just keep my decidedly-not-nefarious digg feed running on this new "digg_news" account and hope no one has a problem with me still using the digg logo.

alien bobblehead vs. mr. blonde video rockets to digg frontpage... really?

This was surprising. The digg community had no reservations digging the Reservoir Dogs ripoff to number one on the digg frontpage. The fervor continues in the comments:

Clearly this was a scientologist trying to ruin the reputation of Anonymous. (+30 diggs)

too bad i was not part of the action, let me know when the next hunt is so i can join you guys... (-7 diggs)

kind of overworked like a SNL skit. it goes on and on, you wait for it to get funny, then its done.

dugg down for 15 year old humor and lack of anything original. if you dugg this up, you are just exhibiting a conditioned response. you are a laugh track on a 'Dharma and Greg' episode. (+17 diggs)

Congrats on the submission, Burento...

digg? i have no beef with digg

If Valleywag reports it, it must be true -- albeit blurry.

While getting a pre-flight, post-sxsw breakfast at the Austin airport with digg CEO Jay Adelson (no, we didn't spend the night together) I had no idea I was also chatting with a fellow rock band virtuoso.

Scoble and the gang should definitely take that act to the street. I think it'd do even better than the breadpig premier, which found its way to the digg front page today.

What's the only thing better than all the traffic from getting breadpig on the front page of a reddit competitor? Knowing it's lowering the intellectual rigor of their site by a notch or two :)

http://digg.com/xbox/Funny_Video_of_Guys_Playing_Rock_Band_on_the_Street

puppy calendar update

Regarding yesterday's entry, digg was not in fact responsible for shipping that adorable puppies calendar.

Sorry for any misunderstandings this may have created. No word on whether or not Kevin Rose does indeed like puppies, but sources close to him have told me "Yes, he does."

with bubblicious acquisition rumors circling, digg still comes through with free schwag

After meeting a bunch of digg employees at our SF meetup, I thought I'd send them over a few reddit shirts so they'd have something to wear at the next one.

Daniel Burka returned the favor with a set of digg shirts shortly thereafter, I've just been taking my sweet time getting this picture online.

Although I'm not sure where that puppies calendar came from. But boy are they cute (just not this cute).

And now I read in Valleywag that they may be getting acquired for $300 million. Pity you can't trust anything you read on Valleywag. But if you could, I'd buy Kevin and Jay a drink.

they'd digg reddit shirts

I wasn't joking when I offered to mail some reddit shirts to the digg folks who drankkit at our meetup.

(I suggested they could also use them for burning effigies if they didn't want to wear them)

Isn't it wonderful to see how free beer can bring people together?

Now all we need is a gang of Lispers to come to one of our next meetups and make amends with Steve for switching to Python...