Other features of Newswire include customizable sorting and displays that can be tailored to each user and an in-page update system.  The updating system operates much like Twitter in alerting users when new stories have been added.

Digg has been reeling since their ill-fated launch of version 4, but new improvements and a more positive attitude towards their community are steps in the right direction. Digg has traditionally been a favorite site for marketers due to the high visibility, the ability to browse previously popular stories by topic.

The instant updates of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have played a part in the downfall of Digg as the turn-around time for articles to become popular has typically been over 12 hours.   ‘Newswire’ may give Digg a well-needed upgrade by boosting the freshness of the articles, or may fall flat like other Digg enhancements – only time will tell.

The change was spotted by Search Engine Watch. Propeller was pitched as a challenger to Digg’s throne. But that never materialized. Its home page is currently filled with submitted stories that only have one or two votes, many of which are spammy content about ATV rentals, plumbing, loans, and carpet services.

Meanwhile, the king of social news/voting sites is also struggling mightily. In a blog post yesterday, Hitwise shared charts showing dramatic losses in traffic to Digg both from U.S. and U.K. Internet users.

Hitwise says U.K. traffic to Digg is down 34% since the end of August; U.S. traffic has dropped by 26% in the same timeframe. That’s when Digg relaunched version 4 of its site, a change that was widely panned by many of Digg’s most loyal users.

A common perception has been that these loyal Digg voters shifted to Reddit.com, but Hitwise says that’s not necessarily the case, at least where the U.K. is concerned:

“…although the decrease in visits to digg is highly noticeable, there hasn’t been a correlating spike in traffic to reddit. During the same period of decline in the UK for digg, reddit only increased its visitors by 2.6%.”

On the other hand, one of Reddit’s founders recently posted an infographic that shows Reddit has surpassed Digg in terms of page views. That and more about Reddit’s current position is in this Nick Douglas article.

As a disclaimer, I should also point out what many of you already know: Our sister site, Sphinn, recently dropped voting altogether in favor of publishing content curated by a team of editors. I’m the Editor-in-Chief at Sphinn.

Postscript: ReadWriteWeb recently updated an article about Digg/Reddit with additional details, including Hitwise saying that U.S. visits to Reddit have increased 15% since the new Digg launched. And a Reddit employee shared a Google Analytics screenshot showing clear traffic growth in the same timeframe.

In that announcement, Rose says the new Digg is a major revision of the site’s front-end and back-end, and promises ongoing changes and new features. Rose says that the new Digg is

• faster — to submit content, vote for content, etc.
• more personal — members can use a custom “My News” home page to see activity from other members they follow, including many large publishers
• more social — activity from contacts is highlighted across the site

One of the major changes I see is hinted at in the second bullet-item above: Digg’s gone corporate. Its platform is now more friendly to large publishers and media outlets. CNN stories on Digg, for example, can be reached at digg.com/cnn. The New York Times is at digg.com/nytimes. And you can follow Search Engine Land content at digg.com/seland. (Our stories aren’t appearing yet, but we expect that to be fixed soon.)

In fact, I should remind fellow search industry folks that Digg announced a few months ago that all banned domains are now unbanned with the launch of the new Digg. That doesn’t mean Digg’s core users will be any more welcoming to SEO content, but it does mean you can at least try again if you’re so inclined.

The DiggBar launched almost exactly a year ago, and was immediately met with criticism from publishers who didn’t like their content being framed, and from search marketers who pointed out that it robbed sites of credit for inbound links. Digg later changed how the DiggBar works in response to these criticisms, but in his announcement today, Rose says the framing issue is why the DiggBar is dead.

Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet. It causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists). It’s an inconsistent/wonky user experience, and I’m happy to say we are killing it when we launch the new Digg.

As for the unbanning of domains, this has affected the search industry for years. Danny Sullivan has written about the uninformed, negative response that almost any SEO-related article gets on Digg from the so-called bury brigade. Rose’s announcement today makes it clear that all content will be welcome on the new Digg.

As you can see, you can mark up or down a story and it shows the number of “pops” next to the story, plus when it was first added. You can even submit your own stories and keep track of your submissions and “my pops.” If you maximize the gadget, you can further filter the stories. Here is a screen capture:

I wonder if this will catch on? We remember when AOL turned Netscape into a Digg clone and it failed. Yahoo also turned Yahoo Buzz into a Digg clone and I don’t believe it has caught on as Yahoo might have hoped.

Here is how Google describes this gadget:

The What’s Popular gadget by Google helps you discover interesting items from all over the Internet.

How we find interesting stuff What’s Popular uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader.

Ratings You can rate items that you like or dislike by clicking the ratings buttons next to each item. If you change your mind, you can change your rating at anytime. The What’s Popular gadget looks at what users liked or disliked to improve its ranking of interesting items.

Add a URL Tell What’s Popular about interesting items you have found! If they become popular, they may rise to the top of our list! You can submit an item with or without attribution to yourself and preview your submission before you post. If you decide to associate your username with your submission you’ll be able to edit its title and description. The items you submitted can be found in the “My adds” area, where you can remove your name if you change your mind.

Terms of Service and Privacy What’s Popular is governed by the Google Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Users who repeatedly submit bad content to What’s Popular may have their rating and adding privileges temporarily suspended. Please go here for issues relating to copyright. All other violations of our terms of use can be reported through the report abuse links.

Prior, Digg used Google AdSense ads to monetize the site. Then Digg dropped Google for Microsoft ads and now, it appears Digg will sell ads directly, and continue to use Microsoft ads for open inventory. The Digg/Microsoft partnership was suppose to last until the summer 2010. Bring the ad management in house will allow Digg to explore more revenue models and create custom ads, that are outside of the IAB standards.

With the new implementation scheduled for next week, only those who are logged into Digg will see the DiggBar. So if you click on a DiggBar URL from Twitter, you won’t see the DiggBar unless you’ve already been to Digg and have a logged in status. Just having a Digg cookie won’t be enough, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose told me when we talked about the new implementation yesterday. A Digg user must be logged in for a DiggBar to show. Logged in users can also opt-out of seeing the DiggBar.

Those who are NOT logged in will simply be redirected to the destination page, via a 301 permanent redirect. This will include search engines that follow those links. Digg’s been in touch with Google’s Matt Cutts on the change, which I’ve confirmed. The consensus is that Google will register DiggBar links as 301 redirects.

Overall, this change is a good thing. It means that link credit will flow to the destination site, rather than being kept by Digg itself.

There remains the separate issue of framing, how that was unpopular in the past and remains so in many quarters given the recent resurgence. Yesterday, it was pointed out by Michael Gray how Kevin Rose himself wasn’t pleased to find his own content being framed. So why do this to others, I asked him.

Kevin’s response was that he felt the Truveo experience was different. He wasn’t a logged in user there, so wasn’t expecting that type of display. He also didn’t like that it was an all-panel framing — that his content was completely surrounded by all four sides, in a frame.

I have mixed feelings. Showing a frame to only logged-in users seems like a fair compromise. There’s no doubt that for some Digg users, the framebar is useful. It’s also easier for them to use than downloading a separate toolbar (though Kevin said Digg still plans to improve and promote its toolbar).

On the other hand, I still hate frames. I also really worry that this will just cause other services to do the same. Imagine if Google decided that it should put up a Google framebar for anyone logged into one of its services? I still think the internet would explode in fury over such a move. But Digg’s compromise would give Google the cover to do so — as it would give cover to Yahoo or Microsoft, and as it now extends cover to Facebook that already does framing.

I wish Digg had made the tough decision to drop the framebar entirely, so that pressure could then be applied to Facebook and StumbleUpon and others to drop theirs. But the compromise does seem a good one, as long as it doesn’t end up opening the gates for more framing. Certainly sites that object can continue to run framebusting scripts, as we do here. That solves the frame issue for them, and the other change deals with the link credit issue that was developing.

For more about the DiggBar, framebusting, 301 redirection and other issues, see these two past articles from me that go into them in much more depth:

• The Growth Of Framebars & Kevin Rose On The DiggBar
• URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?

For more, see discussion on Techmeme.

For those unfamiliar with the DiggBar, it allows people to create a short URL that’s useful in services like Twitter. Anyone clicking on a shortened URL made through Digg gets to a page with a DiggBar at the top. For example, here’s how it looks for a post I recently did on my personal blog about newspapers and concerns over Google:

The red arrow points at one feature, how the DiggBar allows anyone to vote on the page they’re viewing. There are other handy features, such as the ability to see any comments people have made at Digg about the page:

There’s no doubt that if you use Digg a lot, you’ll probably love the DiggBar. But the bar does two things that aren’t making some people (including me) very happy. It doesn’t pass along link credit, and it frames web content.

Link Credit Issues

Last week, my URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? article went into depth about how various URL shorteners work. A key issue is whether these shorteners tells search engines to credit the destination URLs they point at. Those issues what’s called a “301 redirect” do this correctly (my What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters article covers more about link credit issues and why it is important to search rankings).

The DiggBar does not do a 301 redirect (nor can it, as this would prevent the DiggBar from showing at all). If you shorten a page using DiggBar service, then Twitter the short URL you receive, any links that Google or other search engines find via that short URL will send credit to Digg, not to the destination page you shortened.

A sidenote here. Twitter automatically puts a “nofollow attribute” on any links that people tweet. That’s a method to tell search engines that the links shouldn’t be counted as “votes” as part of their ranking processes. However, tweets often appear off the Twitter.com domain. In some of these places, the nofollow attribute (or tag) doesn’t get used. So tweeted links can get counted by search engines, and it remains important that URL shorteners pass along credit to the destination pages.

Digg had a blog post out yesterday explaining that they had done some things they believed would stem concerns about link credit not flowing properly. SEO expert Greg Boser dissected that post, finding it didn’t hold up. I also looked at it today and found problems:

1) Using the noindex tag prevents the pages that Digg makes with shortened URLs from being spidered by Google and other search engines, but that does not solve the issue of them still accumulating all the link credit rather than this going to the destination URL. Also, so far despite using noindex, some of these pages are getting listed in Google. Here’s another example of this. (Looking at the source code, that page lacked a noindex tag an a canonical tag. It seems like originally, the DiggBar didn’t add these tags. Now that they are present, it will take search engines a few days to weeks to catch-up).

2) Using the canonical tag as a form of redirection doesn’t work, because that tag is still treated as a “hint” by search engines rather than an must obey instruction. It also doesn’t work across different domains (IE, Digg.com can’t point at content off Digg.com’s own domain and use the tag to tell the search engines anything).3) The “source URL” solution Digg discusses doesn’t solve anything. What this means is that if you’re on the Digg home page, stories are listed there from across the web. For example, here’s a popular one right now from the Daily Telegraph:

http://digg.com/d1oOii

Digg uses a short URL to point you at that story, which in turn brings the DiggBar up on the top of the page. However, if you can’t run JavaScript (as search engines operate), then you get the long “source URL” like this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/evolution/5131017/Egg-collected-by-Charles-Darwin-found-at-Cambridge-University-after-200-years.html

Digg’s thought was that by showing the long “source” URL to search engines, then the long URL ultimately will get all the link credit. However, there are plenty of places where the short URL will be found across the web by search engines because it is listed with regular HTML, rather than through JavaScript.

Framing Issues

Back in the late 1990s, framing was a big issue. For those unfamiliar, frames allow a web site to pull in content from other web sites into their own pages. It was much loathed for a variety of reasons. It often led to bad user experience. It caused serious issues for search engines, making it difficult for them to spider content properly. Some felt it was a copyright violation — that the site doing the framing was effectively copying their material without permission.

Framing largely disappeared for all of these issues. But now it’s coming back, and Digg’s use with the DiggBar may have been the tipping point.

Last October, StumbleUpon added framing of sites, so that anyone starting a browsing experience from StumbleUpon’s home page gets a framebar like this, as the red arrow points at:

Back in December, Facebook added its own framing of content through a framebar that appears when you click on posted links from within the service. Again, the red arrow points to an example that you can see for yourself here:

Ask.com started framing search results in February. The red arrow below points to the framebar, which appears when you click from Ask search results to a web page that’s listed, like this:

Ask used to do this when it first started out back in the 90s, then dropped framing apparently because so many sites moved away from that model. Now with harder economic times, it apparently finds value in trying to take over the top part of your browser window.

Of course, Google also frames web sites with its Google Image Search service. I believe it has operated this way years and years ago from when image search first started:

There was actually a lawsuit over this, which Google won. Despite that, this might be a good time for Google to reconsider the framing it does.

Also, if Google were ever to frame web sites when you click to them from search results in the way Ask does, the web would almost certain erupt in anger. I don’t think this will happen, of course — but if it’s not something we’d allow Google to do, it’s not something we should be allowing any sites to do.

Framebars Versus Toolbars

Clearly Digg didn’t start the new wave of framing, but it certainly has taken much more heat than Facebook or StumbleUpon over it. I think it’s the combination of URL shortening with framing that’s tipped people over the edge. That mixed framing with the popularity Twitter, where most people these days seem to be using URL shorteners. I think it creates worry that there will be no stopping framing or framebars now.

I feel for services like Digg and Facebook and StumbleUpon. The framebars they’ve created are useful and certainly easier than having users install toolbars for their browsers. But they remain frames, and they bring with them all the negatives about frames that we had in the past.

I’d hope that perhaps there’s an industry move to develop some standards around framebars. For example, if they’re going to be used, perhaps they are less intrusive to a publisher if shown at the bottom of a browser window, rather than at the top. Perhaps there’s also a way to ensure that the URL showing in the browser window remains that of the “source” site with the framebar also displayed (it’s been a long time since I played with frames, so I’m not sure this can be done).

Other ideas might include developing a standard script that publishers can use if they want to break frame code but also inform visitors from a particular site (such as Digg or Facebook) that they can get similar functionality using software toolbars. Perhaps pop-up toolbars in a separate window could work, though there are issues with pop-up blockers.

I don’t know the right answer. Personally, I think the easiest thing would be for everyone to just say no to frames. If you want your dedicated users to have toolbar-like functionality, then have them install an actual toolbar, not a framebar.

Kevin Rose On DiggBar

How’s Digg viewing the uproar? “It’s been a crazy learning experience for us,” Rose said. “We want to follow best practices.”

Rose explained that initially, Digg wanted simply to do a toolbar to help their most active users more easily Digg content or comment on it.

“We wondered what can we create that allows people to go visit that site with a single click and still get a Digg experience. That was kind of the idea behind creating the bar in the first place,” he said.

More as an afterthought, when seeing how popular it was to shorten URLs on Twitter, Digg added on a shortening aspect to the DiggBar.

“The goal in creating this wasn’t, ‘Let’s be the universal URL shortener.’ It was ‘Let’s make a tool that can enhance the experience for Digg users’.”

Rose said someone at Digg did speak with a software engineer at Google, as mentioned in their blog post, about the best way to pass along credit to Google — but he didn’t know who that was. Fair to say, they’ll get the straight scoop shortly, as Rose is now set to speak to Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s spam fighting efforts and who also closely watches over webmaster issues.

As for the DiggBar’s future itself, Rose said the company is taking in all the feedback to determine what’s the next best step.

“I want to make it known by all means that we’re sitting down and thinking about this stuff and trying to come up with solutions that work for anyone,” he said.

What’s A Webmaster To Do?

While Digg reexamines the DiggBar, there are webmasters who will remain concerned. My original article on URL shorteners has code you can use to block framebars. Wikipedia has a page about this, too, and you can see John Gruber’s code here. By the way, we actually had that code on our site before the DiggBar came out, just as a general best practice of breaking frames.

Of course, if you like the idea that people can more easily Digg (or Stumble or Facebook) your content, then you might not have an issue with using the frames.

I’d still recommend that if you’re wanting to shorten URLs for your own sites, use a service that’s primarily built for that and which does 301 redirect.

Digg hopes to be able to use these funds to:

• Improve their infrastructure
• Expand internationally
• Hire more staff
• Personalize the Digg experience
• Enhance the recommendation system
• And more features…

Digg has more or less been for sale for months and rumors have been circulating that either Google or Microsoft would buy the company.

Now TechCrunch is reporting that Digg is close to selling for $200 million to Google. That compares with the originally rumored $300 million price target.

Digg has a display ad deal with Microsoft, which presumably would end or be threatened if Google actually acquired the company. But that’s the least interesting part of this rumor.

More interesting to consider is how and where Google might use Digg or its underlying algorithms. For example, Google has been testing an experimental interface that allows for individual and community voting on the relevance of search results. It thus may be that a Digg acquisition would hold broader, general search implications for Google.

Digg itself started life as a “news” site but is angling to become a much broader “recommendations engine” across a range of categories. One might see that integrated into Maps/Local and other areas on Google. Indeed, the company always seems to have several motives and use cases for its acquisitions.

Assuming for a moment the truth of the rumor, Eric Eldon at VentureBeat asks a very interesting question: why doesn’t Google build its own version of Digg? It certainly could. And while Digg is a popular site, it’s hardly the mainstream breakaway success that YouTube had become when Google acquired the latter in October 2006.

In fact, Digg has fallen behind the newer Yahoo Buzz in terms of traffic according to comScore. So it may be something of a perishable asset; Digg itself seems to be acting that way.

There’s more coverage and discussion on Techmeme.