So, I haven’t been invited to the Venice Project Beta for an exclusive “first look”, but if you want to know what’s going on, look no further. Some of your favourite blogs covered the details today so that you can get a breakdown of what’s going on with the software. Now while I KNOW that the emphasis is on the software with the unveiling of the beta (userfriendly, fast, skye-like, community features, makes you breakfast and so on), surely there’s one fact we can’t all forget.

Its about the Content, Stupid.

At the end of the day, the features that the Venice Project are rolling out are incredibly marginal compared to the importance of great content.

People are willing to put up with a whole lot of inconveniences to get a hold of something watchable. Dead links. Slow loading stuff. Low resolution video. Horrible UI. System-resource hogging software. And for some, they knowingly risk potential litigation.

I know what you’re thinking — “But, Tony — that represents a huge opportunity!” And to that I would say, “but only a marginal one if, all things being equal, the content is still non-existent”. Early adopters will continue to put up with an enormous amount of crap to get what they want — and will continue to do so as long as the content is there.

Let’s hear a little more about their content partners before we all get hyped up about the features. After all, without great content, the rest is just details.

Little, un-monetizable, details.

[Of course I’m not calling anyone “stupid”, per se — the title and content is a play on the infamous line by Bill Clinton who said, “its the economy, stupid” as one of his signature lines during the 1992 Presidential Election]

Well, well, well. It looks like the SEO community started noticing Digg (not necessarily a bad thing), and Digg started noticing back . And in the dustup, it looks like they all learned a harsh lesson that John Chow learned a few months ago : Digg’s definition of Spam is completely relative.

Completely relative to what?

Completely relative to what the Digg community’s definition of “Spam” is. And this roughly equates to what it doesn’t like. Spam has often been associated with unsolicited email — but much like the term “Nazi”, its grown to encompass a great many things beyond its initial definition.

Here’s a recap: On Digg, “Spam” is reporting is completely voluntary, and to my knowledge, completely automated. As I initially reported int he “John Chow” incident, Digg depends on its users to report spam, much like they depend on it to submit and vote on quality content. I suppose they should be applauded for trying to keep a certain degree of symmetry here, but just like they take a laissez-faire and hands-off approach to the submission and voting up of content — they take an equally hands off approach to the flagging of “Spam” content.

People can routinely label any submission they want as “Spam”, “Lame”, “Duplicate”, “Inaccurate”, and “Wrong Topic”. When a submission getes enough “buries” under these categories (the number is yet to be defined), it gets taken off the frontpage if its in the frontpage, and it becomes impossible to find by “searching” unless you hit the “buried” radio button to search buried topics.

If enough stories from a given URL is buried, that URL gets banned. Automatically.

What does “banned” mean? It means that Diggers get a message saying something to the effect of “That URL is banned” any time they try and submit something FROM that URL to Digg. Unless extraordinary measures are undertaken, quite often it is almost impossible to un-ban a URL.

So what’s the problem with all of this?

Well, the problem is that Digg moderates “bury” votes about as well as it moderates its Digg submissions — and that means its lousy to the point of being ineffective.

If you listen to Kevin Rose on a recent interview at Net@Night a few weeks ago with Leo Laporte and Amber Mac, he actually tells you (roll to about 21:15) what their moderation system is like. It involves a couple dudes (or dudettes) in Europe (Sweden?) who work in shifts.

“We have someone who watches the day and someone who watches it at night  … that person’s in the Netherlands, so it makes things easier… there’s 4-5000 newly submitted stories; there’s no way any one individual could go through that and police the content … depending on the number of Diggs and the topic its submitted to, a certain number of buries are required for it to be pulled from the frontpage or queue … it really is up to the community to yank the content”

TWO people moderating over 5000 submissions a day.

Kevin doesn’t tell you how many emails they get declaring a URL is spamming Digg; and he doesn’t tell you how many URLs a day are flagged as “ban-able”. But I would suggest that it is probably a significant number, that when added to that 5000 they have to check, such that they NEED to depend on their trustworthy community to help them “police” itself. (more…)

So, as you may or may not know, I am also the assistant editor at the BlogHerald, and am helping Mark Saunders (chief Honcho) and Abe Olandres (junior Honcho) with the transition to 2007 and beyond.

My post frequency has dropped off in recent days, as I have been a bit of a busy bee helping the Herald get out of the Funk it has been since the change in ownership.

One of the challenges we first faced was the absence of some really key bloggers who were making a name for themselves over the past few months. I mean, of course, Thord Hedengren and Muhammad Saleem. Dave Krug’s departure also hurt in a different way — he brought some intangibles to the mix that are hard to replace (wild prison stories, industry connections — the usual stuff). Martin Neumann also went his separate ways, and although he wasn’t quite as regular, we will miss that Aussie’s brand of knowledge and insight on publishing, monetization.

Right now we are concentrating on gathering the best bloggers we can to produce the best quality content we can. We are currently in the middle of our first roster “reveal”, and there are a few left to go. But for the ones who are announced already, I am particularly proud and humbled by their choice to help the ‘Herald out on its next stage of bloggerific evolution. (more…)

So a new Digg has been up now for just over 24h, and seeing as I have blogged endlessly about Digg before, it would seem negligent that I don’t put in a short post now. The obvious new focus seems to be on podcasting and videos. A la normal text-based news, you’ll have the opportunity to submit and vote on your favourite podcasts (and episodes). There is also an improved way to vote on videos as well as preview them. And in a strange way, it almost seems like Digg is trying to disintermediate YouTube in a fashion, since you’ll be able to preview videos before you actually see them (which doesn’t exist on YouTube).

And yes, of course there is the new splash of paint as well.

[Which, as an aside, looks so garishly bubble 1.0 it makes me throw up a little. Blue and green? Weren’t all 1.0 website blue and green at some stage? (cough cough — Amazon, anyone?) I mean, sure everyone has had enough of the clear mac-like bubbles, reflections, and fisher-price style writing, but blue and green isn’t old enough to be “retro”, man!]

Anyway, are there enough changes to make it an upgrade of any other significance? What about issues that Diggers (some of them — the ones that notice) have brought up? Or, better yet ,have even been noticed by the MSM blogger / digital media?

If you break them down, it looks like they’re either not addressed at all, or, are being addressed behind the scenes so that we can’t tell if they’re being updated (after all, the Digg blogg certainly won’t tell you).

1. Recognizing top diggers
The issue of people paying diggers for submissions has made their rounds in the blogosphere; everyone knows it now. What has Digg done to address this issue? Not much. Does moving the “Top Diggers” link all the way to the bottom of the page count? Maybe PR firms and marketers won’t find them there, right?  Right.  And maybe Kevin Rose will appear at one of those Netscape chats to field questions on the issue. (more…)

So this chain letter thing is floating around the blogosphere, except you get to find things out about people, and there are no threats of buildings falling on your head, or elephants trampling over your loved ones if you don’t participate.  And hey, aren’t they the best kind of chain letters anyway?  So here it goes, courtesy of Thord.

1. I have been online in some form or another since 1994, when I worked for a local computer camp teaching 8 year olds html markup.  Yes, sir, that’s when AOL had yet to contribute to landfills the world over with their “free” offers, Netscape was still “cool”, Microsoft hadn’t “gotten” the Internet, and Google was still just a number that only number geeks knew.

2. I am a big comic book geek.  And with the proliferation of comic book movies and the growth of Manga in normal book sellers its changing from what I knew as a child.  But at least its growing!  (Oh, Comic Book Guy — I think you’ll be an anachronism soon).  Also cool?  How Marvel and DC are collecting their stuff in trades.  I can catch up on 2 years worth of issues in a single hour!

3. I am a direct marketing geek as well.  Does anyone still remember $20 Marketing Bootcamps, the “magic” of ezine “marketing, and Corey Rudl?  RIP, man.

4. I love my Xbox Media Center.  Modifying your Xbox with the Xbox Media Center is truly the best thing since sliced bread; I have it hooked into my LAN at home, so I can stream videos and movies right to my TV.  The best part?  The interface is absolutely delicious (man, it is so good), and it is a virtual swiss army knife when it comes to formats.  Xvid, quicktime, it does it all.  The only problem is that it can’t stream true high definition stuff, but its a forgivable small strike against it, as that’s what the Xbox360 is for.

5. I actually like Digg. In spite of all of the critical posts on Digg, I have been watching Digg for two years (Dec 04).  Back then, it wasn’t all that unusual to see front page posts with 20 Diggs.  I am critical of Digg only because of the some of the inherent hypocrisies, the way it treats its best users, and how corrupt its gotten, in spite of its geeky roots.

At this point I’m obligated to pass it along, and I nominate Yaro (who I am separated by 3 degrees of separation — man, its a small world), Amit , Muhammad , Jessica , and Abe .

Boy, it must be hard for Mikey A these days. Trying to get some R ‘n R with the folks, all the while dealing with the fall out from Le Web 3, and now this. After less than two months with TechCrunch, Natali Del Conte is leaving the saint of start ups (at least, many of them pray to get crunched, anyway) for greener pastures. Mr. Arrington leaves few details on Crunchnotes, but he does allude to one of them:

It’s hard to explain how brutal user comments can be. And if you are a woman you often have to deal with sexism as well. Natali was dealing with both. She’s never had that kind of direct, anonymous feedback, and it’s clear it got to her to some extent. I’m very sorry for that.

While I have been blessed by generally courteous compliments on this blog, the very fact you’re on TC makes you a target; and to be honest, when I Googled “Natali Del Conte” when she was first hired, I was surprised to hear that she already had her share of anonymous detractors. One choice commenter on an episode of “Cranky Geeks” had these choice words about her:

Natali has her own show!?!
She barely fits in her role now with her mindless commentary and Dvorak-lite conspiracies … We’ve seen many quality female guests and Natali’s saving grace is her lifesavers … Natali is like the Jessica Simpson of the Tech world.

Now to be honest, this was the only negative comment on that site. On the other hand, the substance of the other comments are complimentary in so far as that they refer to how ‘hawt’ she is, and not about her journalistic prowress, her sharp insights, or other non-physical attributes.

Wonderful. (more…)

In what can only be characterized as a moment of sheer drunken madness, b5media has asked DeepJiveInterests to join the b5media community. And before they can sober up, I am taking them up on the offer!

The move came a few weeks ago as I was debating which direction to take me and this blog; I got a few kind emails from Darren Rowse and Mark Evans asking how things were, with an invitation to join b5media at the time. The reason for the delay is that the folks at b5media are allowing me to be a test case of sorts, as I’m the only blog thus far that has not actually moved to their servers.

As a result, getting the blogroll up and going has been a hair raising (and pulling) opportunity that I am still sorting out with Aaron “Code Ninja” Brazell. The issue has mainly been around Dreamhost, the host I love and hate, which doesn’t support include(), file(), or other functions that are able to call a URL remotely.

At any rate, since its monday, I thought I would make the announcement, since its as good a time as any — and thank all of the guys at b5 for the invitation. I’ve had the chance of meeting Mark and Darren in person (man, that Pre-Mesh party was great) as well as a few others over the phone (Liz, I’m lookin’ at you! :), and they all seem like a class act.

And heck, how could I refuse joining a blog network that isn’t founded in Silicon Valley, but my home town of Toronto? :)

Here’s towards the beginning of a beautiful relationship, guys.

Look for me in the “Tech” section as soon as I figure out the D@#(*& blogroll (or maybe a little sooner).