Fast Company: Digg Was Just Bought By An Ad-Tech Company Called BuySellAds. Ewww. “Last month, Digg, an old beloved content aggregation destination, made the sad announcement to its loyal following that it was shutting down its RSS platform, Digg Reader. This wasn’t merely a product decision, it turns out, but a development as the company transitioned to a new parent company.”
Mmmkay: Gannett has invested in Digg. “Gannett announced Tuesday that it has invested in the news aggregator Digg. That investment, for an undisclosed amount, will help Gannett’s USA Today Network reach more people and offer Digg more original and local content, according to a press release.”
Digg is launching a bot for Slack. “Our bot is still a newborn, but it’s already learned some pretty cool tricks. It can find the best and most timely content based on keywords, and will also send you stuff throughout the day that is trending or important. And if you’ve been buried in an Excel model since dawn, don’t worry: twice a day, DiggBot will send you a package of articles and videos to catch you up. DiggBot is still a little shy, and we’re still teaching it to talk. But give it a few weeks, and we’re sure it’ll become friendlier. Also, we’re letting DiggBot play in Slack first, but it’ll pop into other messaging playgrounds soon.” Is Slack like the next evolution of RSS?
Digg is trying some algorithmic ways of recommending video, and there’s a nice crunchy explanation over on Medium.
Digg has gotten a new round of funding. I’m thrilled to hear it. Digg has an excellent RSS feed reader, and I love the way they’ve designed the Digg Dialog series.
Adrienne LaFrance, who did a recent article in The Atlantic on digital impermanence, also did a recent Digg Dialog on the same topic. Lots of thoughtful questions and answers. I love the format that Digg has put together for this.
Digg has launched Digg Dialog. “Here’s how Digg Dialog works: When we discover and feature an exceptional article (or video), we will invite the journalist or an expert to come talk with Digg’s community. If they accept, we will schedule a Dialog and post the time and guest on our homepage. A few hours before our guest arrives, the Dialog page will go online, and you will be able to start posting questions.” Sounds like a AMA’s cousin.
Digg is apparently trying to subvert Reddit-type issues by releasing a set of community guidelines. “Naturally, content that will not be allowed on Digg includes slurs, epithets, and hateful speech. In addition, abusive names will not be permitted (must be rated G or PG, according to the company). The service won’t also tolerate gratuitous or explicitly sexual remarks, trademark or copyright infringement, spamming, harassment, privacy violations, illegal speech (fraud or phishing), or abusive mis-flagging of comments or users by people who claim that guidelines are being violated.”
I love Digg Reader, which I believe I’ve mentioned until y’all are good and sick of it. But there’s more to Digg than just the reader; it looks like it might be getting back into community as well. “When we rebuilt and relaunched Digg three years ago (ah, #tbt!) we shelved pretty much all of the community features. Our sense was that Digg’s community had almost entirely disappeared. We decided to strike out in a different direction, until the time seemed right to bring conversations back in. A few months ago, our designers and developers started to build. In the past couple of weeks, lots of people have been talking about what makes a good (and bad) community. For our part, we threw some pointed questions out to Digg’s users, especially since we’re in the middle of building community features. Last week, about 1,500 of you were nice enough to […]
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