Earlier this week, the social news site Digg announced changes to their algorithm that are an aggressive attempt to discount the efforts of marketers to push their stories to the homepage. If you’re not familiar with Digg (first off, where have you been?), essentially the site works by users submitting stories from around the Web, and other users “digging” (voting) a story. While there are other elements to its algorithm, the basic premise is that if a story gets enough Diggs, it gets on the homepage, and the site that published it gets a surge in traffic.

Traffic is of course a valuable commodity to Web publishers. As Digg has grown in popularity, so too has the practice of people leaning on their social network to help get their stories to the front page. For especially well-connected Digg users (the site has social networking features too) and people with a wide following on services like Twitter, it became fairly easy to get stories on the homepage simply by sending a message to your friends asking for help.

The impact of all of this leads to the problem that Jeffro pointed out the other day:

“Digg is now controlled by the majority of users who just so happen to be Apple fanboys, who just happen to be Linux fanboys, who just happen to be political nut cases. Occasionally, you will see an article reach the front page that doesn’t fit in these three categories, but for the most part, these three categories run the roost.”

The changes Digg made  look to prevent this, by de-emphasizing stories that are dugg by familiar groups of people. The hope is that by doing so, a greater diversity of stories will find their way to the homepage. Of course, this really pisses off some of the most powerful Digg users, who have lost a bit of the clout that they spent years building up.

However, while these folks are being quite vocal in protesting the changes, the masses seem to agree with the move, as yesterday’s poll at Mashable indicates:

Digg’s vision is to democratize news – not just tech news but news in the other categories they have added such as current events, sports, and entertainment. That’s hard to do when you have a handful of like-minded, well-connected people determining what gets exposure. That said, I hope Digg still rewards those (through more power in the algorithm) who originally submit stories that ultimately make it to the homepage without artificial gaming.

The people behind Digg aren’t stupid – they knew that this move could cost them some of their most influential and powerful users. However, they’re sticking to their vision, and if the move is successful, the site really could be as ground-breaking as the founders would like to have you believe it is.

Over the weekend, Louis Gray published a fairly critical piece about the blog I help edit, entitled “Mashable Uses A-List Power to Steal B-List Buzz.”  Basically, Gray wasn’t happy with the way we provided attribution to sources on three stories we ran in recent weeks.   It’s important to note that it’s not the first time Gray has called out specific blogs in regards to a “best practices” issue – several months ago he criticized #1 tech blog Engadget (and us) in a post about internal linking (another issue for another day – Pete responded and explained it here). 

While I don’t necessarily agree with his tactics in making his point (it would’ve been nice if he’d emailed myself or Pete Cashmore prior to publishing, but perhaps it’s our fault for not making our contact info and roles more prominent), as Pete summed it up in a Twitter post, “perversely, I’m glad people are asking about our editorial policies: it shows we matter, & also reminds us of our growing responsibilities.”

“Growing responsibilities” is something I think the whole blogosphere is still coming to grips with, and a reason we need people like Louis Gray, as much as it might suck to become  the whipping boy for an industry-wide problem.  Blogging as a medium is only a decade old, and it’s only in the last few years it has become something that more than a few early adopters keep track of.  Thus, the standards are still being determined.  Print journalism has been around for hundreds of years, and while their standards are more established, they are still constantly evolving. 

Returning to the issue at hand – attribution – I think Gray makes some valid points, and we’re already putting in place measures at Mashable to make it clearer where a story comes from when we’re not the source.  For starters, we’re going to phase out the “via” links that are commonly found on many, many blogs in the tech space.  For those of you not familiar with the intricacies of blogger-speak, a “via” link typically comes at the very bottom of a post, linking back to the original source where the facts came from.  So, for example, if we were to blog about something first reported in The New York Times, you might see a link at the bottom of the post “via new york times.”  Bottom line: these are a sucky way to link to an original source, especially when it’s a one-man shop like Louis Gray who could certainly benefit from a more prominent link on a blog that gets a few hundred thousand daily visitors. 

Second, Gray took issue with the way we attributed a quote he obtained via phone conversation with Robert Scoble regarding his move to Fast Company.  That story was written by Mark Hopkins, one of our talented bloggers who also edits part of the night shift.  As someone that majored in journalism, I agree that Mark did not attribute the quote properly (though, he did still link to Gray earlier in the article), and had I been made aware of the issue, I would have edited it.  However, I think Mark made an honest mistake.  Unlike myself, Mark actually comes from a hardcore technical background and is not a classically trained journalist.  This is a huge asset to Mashable and many other blogs, as people like Mark understand issues on a whole different level from folks that follow the industry at 30,000 feet.  It’s like the difference between Leslie Stahl’s profile of Facebook on “60 Minutes” and an in-depth look at the code behind the company’s application platform on Mashable or another tech blog.  Both are valuable, but you’re not going to find the latter on a national television broadcast.

As for Gray’s third main point about other blogs linking to Mashable as the source when he is clearly quoted, all I can say is “welcome to the club.”  We often report a story first and don’t get the credit from folks that report it later on.  While I think this is usually unintentional, the cold and hard truth of the matter is that for some, linking has become form of “sucking up” and getting on people’s radar.  That said, as we move to do a better job of attribution at Mashable, I think it’s also important that we look at a wider variety of sources and incorporate numerous interesting opinions into articles where we’re not a primary source.  When you’re not writing as a primary source, it’s up to you to add value, and one way to do this in the blog world is turn people on to new and innovative ideas.   I think people like Mathew Ingram and Steven Hodson do a terrific job of this, and while it will take time, I hope we can start to move in this direction with our secondary reporting at Mashable. 

Finally, as for the anonymous commenters who used Gray’s post as an opportunity to bash Mashable, our mailbox is open if you have specific incidents you’d like to discuss.  We’re not in the business of sharing your emails with the world, so if you contact us, rest assured it’s confidential.  Despite what some haters would like to have you believe, we don’t break embargoes (unless someone else does first) and correct materially wrong errors we make in our reporting.  In specific regards to embargoes, until recently (today in fact) we had an issue with our server that was making timestamps on our site inaccurate.  If you read Mashable via an RSS reader, you can see that any embargoed stories come out at the same time as those published by other sites that have been pre-briefed. 

In retrospect, I’m actually glad that Louis Gray called us out on the attribution issue, because it now allows us to take a leadership role in making changes for the good of the industry.  Along those lines, being able to react, respond, and implement policy adjustments within 48 hours of what some people might view as a PR disaster is one of the many reasons I love being in this space.   We can always do better, and hopefully this will help us do just that. 

I’ve hired a friend of mine to cook up a new design for AdamOstrow.com.  The goal is to better mashup the various projects I’m involved with, as well as the many different services that I use regularly. I’m also going to be moving from Typepad to WordPress.  Hopefully we’ll be ready to launch by the end of the week.

Twitter does not appear to have put its downtime issues behind it.  With Steve Jobs currently keynoting at Macworld and Apple fanboys eager to relay his every word, Twitter has once again crashed and has been mostly inaccessible for the last 45 minutes.

While so far system downtime has done little to stop Twitter’s explosive growth, let’s not forget that in the mid 90s, downtime eventually became a huge thorn in AOL’s side, even though there were few competitors for *gasp* dialup Internet access at the time.  Unlike a mid 90s ISP which required billions of dollars in capital to get off the ground, competitors to Twitter can be launched by one smart computer programmer in about a week.

Update: Posted some more thoughts on this at Mashable.  Two hours later, I still can’t access Twitter. 

Last I blogged (on here anyhow) I was in Boulder, Colorado
ringing in the New Year. I had a great
time hanging out with one of my oldest (or more accurately, long-term) friends,
and even squeezed in a meeting with a really interesting local Web company –
Fuser.

After that, I spent about a week back in Virginia before heading out to San Francisco
for the Mashable-hosted Open Web Awards last Thursday night. I’ve embedded the video below if you care to
watch the festivities, but overall I was pretty pleased with the event. We had an excellent turnout, and while I didn’t
meet nearly as many people as I would’ve liked (we were preparing literally
until the last minute), I did meet a lot of folks that I’ve frequently chatted
with online but never in person, such as Grant Robertson of Download Squad and
MG Siegler of Paris Lemon. I also had a
nice chat with Brad Hunstable, CEO of UStream.tv, which is one of the startups
I’m watching very closely this year.  

In addition to other bloggers and industry folks, I also met
my colleagues for the first time: Pete, Kristen, and Adam (well, I previously
met Adam at the NY/DC MashMeets, but the first time all of us were together). Some folks find it pretty hard to believe
that we operate completely virtually, but I actually think it’s a
blessing. As we all noted, we got way
less actual work done when we were together! Face time is always good, but day-to-day, at least in the realm of
publishing, I don’t think we could possibly get as much done if we were all seated
in an office together. 

My other note from my travels is that Virgin America absolutely rocks! It is the best airline I’ve ever flown, hands
down. New clean planes, excellent
entertainment systems, food/drinks on-demand, and (at least for the moment)
relatively inexpensive. They only fly to
a handful of cities at the moment, but if you’re in tech and travel to SF, I’d
definitely recommend flying with Virgin. 

I think one of the most important parts of running an online community is keeping a very open dialogue with users.  One way to do this is periodically offering a "state of our site" post, outlining in as open and honest a way as possible where your site stands on the issues that are important to users. 

Being New Year’s Eve, I decided to make such a post to MindSay users this morning, addressing some common concerns of users, and throwing out a few ideas as to where we’ll take things in 2008.  In part, it was a response to some recent blog entries I’d seen on the site that questioned who was behind the site and whether or not it was a viable business.  While I quickly responded to those entries individually, I think it was also important to address them in a public forum to assure everyone things are in good shape, and remind them how easy it is to get in touch with me if they ever have concerns. 

Anyways, as the comments stream in I’ll know whether or not I did an adequate job in addressing the concerns of my users.  Even if I failed at doing so, at least everyone will know I’m alive and that I care :-)  If you run your own online community, take this slow work day to let your users know the real deal. 

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays!  I’ve been back in New York for almost two weeks, first for MashMeet NYC, and the rest of the time just hanging with my family and friends while working from home.  Tonight it’s off to Colorado where I’ll be celebrating New Year’s Eve with one of my best friends from high school.  He’s actually a distance runner training to make the Olympics, so, we’ll be kicking off the year with high hopes for the both of us. 

With both Christmas and New Year’s falling in the middle of the week this year, I think it has been a more prolonged holiday season than usual.  Things have been fairly slow, which I don’t much mind because I think the year is going to get off to an incredibly frantic start.  A week after I get back to Virginia from Colorado I’ll be off to SF for the Mashable-hosted Open Web Awards.  After that, I imagine the news cycle will have picked back up to full force, as will my ambition to sleep less, exercise more, and make extra time for my other endeavors. 

I haven’t been blogging as much here on AdamOstrow.com as I’d like lately, but I have been using Twitter much more than I thought I would (feel free to follow me and I’ll return the favor).  While as someone that works in the Web space, I find it of pretty good value (maybe a 6 on a scale of 1-10), I’m still sticking to my original belief that I really don’t see it taking off in the mainstream.  As tech people, we too often forget that the vast majority of people don’t spend all day in front of a computer, and that the occasional Facebook status update, email, IM, or god forbid a phone call, is enough for most people to keep up with each other.   That’s why things like the Facebook News Feed are so brilliant - they bring you up to speed with what your friends are up to in a couple minutes, which, is all that most people have.  This doesn’t mean that a big Web company won’t significantly overpay to acquire Twitter in ‘08 - there is a good chance one of them will. 

I’ve been thinking about putting together a "2008 Outlook" post with thoughts on work, goals, and my various side projects, but so far haven’t been able to put it down paper.  While I have a lot of goals in mind, as I told someone recently, I’m pretty happy with where I’m at right now and can see some of the next logical steps, so setting a time-specific goal seems kind of silly.  Perhaps I’ll work on something a little more concrete on one of my upcoming flights.  In the meantime, I did publish some Web-specific predictions for 2008 at Mashable that you can check out if you’re so inclined.

In case I don’t publish again before the calendar switches over, I hope everyone has a wonderful New Year.  I’m pretty pleased with the way 2007 has turned out, even if it is a million miles from where I first envisioned it when I got off the plane at BWI returning from Hawaii on New Year’s Eve 06/07.  Cheers!

Now that I’ve been a full-time blogger for almost a year, I can’t help but think back to when I launched my company – MindSay – and the things I would have done differently now knowing how things work on the other side. 

Back then, we were actually one of the first blogging/social networking communities out there (at least, among the first few hundred, as opposed to the first few hundred thousand).  We had a few novel features (for the time, ~ mid-2003) – the ability to group your contacts (friends, co-workers, drinking buddies, etc.) and push content to them accordingly, options to update your blog via instant messaging, and even Facebook-like status updates.  Nonetheless, when it came to promoting the site, at least as far as press goes, I was totally clueless.

We issued a few press releases that first year and received maybe one or two bites – I recall a story in CIO Australia, and I think something on Internet.com.  The process would usually go something like this: I’d stay up for days, agonizing over every word, making sure we included as many buzz phrases as possible, and tweaking the headline a few dozen times until I thought we had something appealing.  Then, I’d sign up with one of the press release distribution services, and usually on a Monday or Tuesday morning, I would fire off a release and wait for the phone to ring.  As Jim Cramer likes to say, usually I’d end up drinking cheap scotch on my linoleum floor later on that evening, depressed that all of that effort and a few hundred dollars had went for naught. 

Now, from the other side of the PR game (blogging), I can see exactly what I did wrong.  First, unless you are Google, Yahoo, or some other company that everyone is familiar with, blindly issuing a release is a horrible idea.  With the amount of different inputs a journalist has today (email, RSS reader, phone, Twitter, etc.), the chances of someone taking notice of your itsy bitsy startup is very remote.  Plus, the amount of news that comes out on Mondays and Tuesdays is simply staggering – usually by 10 or 11am the queue of stories that need to be covered is so large that there is absolutely no room to squeeze in a “sort of interesting press release” from a company you’ve never heard of.  This, I think, is why even the big boys like Google and Yahoo usually don’t just send something straight to the wires and instead arrange an “exclusive” that will ensure far and wide coverage for their story. 

An exclusive in tech reporting usually goes like this: a company sends you news a few days in advance, letting you know you’re the first to have it, and tells you it’s under “strict embargo” until a certain date and time.  The biggest of the big (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.) tend to give these to a large mainstream publication – The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and BusinessWeek are often the sources where major stories in tech first break.  These stories then get picked up by TV, blogs, and other media as journalists hurry to get their own coverage of the story published.  While this is an effective way for leading Web companies to break news, the vast majority of new and interesting Web companies will send their stories under embargo to a variety of industry blogs like Mashable. 

Short of an exclusive with a big mainstream publication, an embargo has become one of the most effective weapons in a PR person’s arsenal.  Here’s how that works: usually, someone will send us an email asking us if we’d like to receive embargoed news about company x.  Once we’ve agreed to the date and time set by the PR person, we then have a chance to review the new product, write a review, and set our story to publish at the given time. 

However, under this circumstance, we know we’re most likely not the only blog covering the news, which, you would think makes the idea lose some of its appeal.  But on the other hand, like Allen Stern of CenterNetworks recently noted, embargoes have one big advantage for journalists: the ability to take your time in checking out a new site, versus the frantic rush to “be first” involved in covering breaking news.  Additionally, from a competitive standpoint, if you have good news judgment instincts, you know which stories rival blogs are going to cover, so you feel inclined to cover it as well.  Thus, it’s no mistake when you see the same startup covered by 4 or 5 leading tech blogs at the same time and rising towards the top of TechMeme and other news aggregators. 

Knowing what I know now, my advice to a startup would be to go the embargo route if you have a major piece of news.  While an exclusive with The New York Times might seem appealing, just because you’ve ensured coverage doesn’t mean it’s going to be positive coverage.  Anyone who has been interviewed by a reporter a few times has probably had the experience of being misquoted, misunderstood, or just ending up flat out unhappy with the way their story was spun.  If you go the exclusive route, you’re taking a major risk of this happening, versus having a variety of different reporters of various backgrounds analyzing your offering.  Hopefully, at least one of those opinions results in a quote worthy of printing on your homepage and marketing materials.  Even in the worst-case scenario where your embargoed release ends up in 5 or 6 negative reviews, at least you end up with 5 or 6 sites with good page rank linking to you, which in the long-run will greatly improve your search engine rankings as you re-tool and try to do better next time around.

Anyways, I’m sure my fellow tech bloggers who read this will find it fairly rudimentary, and for the PR people, it’s probably repeating much of what you already know.  But hopefully my advice will reach a few folks who are where I was a few years ago: 20-years-old with a lot of ideas, $0 for a PR strategy, and no idea how to effectively get the word out.  To them, good luck, and send me your news, first, preferably

Shares of Celgene, a biotech I’ve owned for some time, off 14% this morning, ouch.  Apparently one of their drugs did not perform as well as expected in clinical trials, at least according to analysts that cover the stock.  Reports in the press yesterday indicated the trials were successful. 

Perhaps I should just stick to things I understand extremely well like chicken wings and beer.  I’ve made another 17% in Buffalo Wild Wings since re-entering that stock when it bottomed a few weeks back. 

Regardless of where you stand politically, religiously, or which candidate you are supporting, Mitt Romney had some very good points in his speech today about what freedom of religion means in America, and its importance in our society.  Given his faith has (rather unfairly in my opinion) become a central issue in his campaign, it was an important speech for him to give, and one I think he delivered quite well without shying away from his own beliefs.

I’d still consider myself undecided on all three issues, but Romney earned my respect with this speech.