Digg: 159,500,000 reasons why format matters.

Digg: 159,500,000 Reasons Format Matters

Digg, one of the pioneers of social media news, is selling itself off for roughly half a million dollars. If that sounds like a lot, take a step back and recall that WhatsApp, a single app, recently sold for $16 billion the other week. If that’s not enough, consider the fact that the Digg was once valued at $164 million in 2008. So how did its buyer, New York based tech firm BetaWorks, get what was once one of the top sites for what is really pocket change?

Digg was, at heart, one of the first real social media networks. It was created by Kevin Rose, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who wanted to give users a way to manage their own content and media. Digg was the first to introduce the concept of “friends” and “followers,” and for years it seemed that it’s competitors where at least a couple steps behind. That was up until 2010, when the company laid out an interface redesign that triggered massive backlash from its users. Despite the outcry, the company pushed forward with its relaunch, and by the end of the year Digg had lost half of its user base. The company scrambled to retract some of its ill-received updates, including the controversial “Diggbar” that came with version 4.0, but the damage was done. Kevin Rose stepped down as CEO, handing the reigns over to Matt Williams, and the company never clawed its way back up.

There’s a real lesson to be learned from Digg’s fall from grace. The company did nothing to change its core content, yet was still able to alienate half its user base with a single redesign. The devil really is in the details when it comes to layout changes, and it’s why blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo are so touchy when it comes to changing their own. As tech blogs, their audience is even more sensitive to bad updates than others. This, coupled with the fact that the audience could easily switch to another blog (ie. the Verge), means that when updates do happen, they aren’t drastic.

After the acquisition, Digg is going to be relaunced under an entirely new staff and CEO. Betaworks also plans to work Digg into its current news service, News.me. Since no one has heard of News.me, this probably is the end for Digg. Bye buddy, Reddit and I will miss you.

Spritz: taking reading back to the drawing board.

There are very few aspects of our lives that we all consider second nature. Reading is one of them. We’ve done it the same way for hundreds of years, line by line across the page. That is, maybe until now. Spritz is a start up that hopes to not only be the first to challenge the way we read just about everything, but make us ask ourselves, “what took so long?”

The concept is a text streaming technology that delivers content to users word by word. The idea behind the service is that time and effort is wasted when we are forced to move our eyes along a line of text, and that there is real potential in streamlining the whole process for mobile phones and tablets. The science behind the the tech is built upon how we interpret and store written information. The claim is that the effort normally used to sift through line and line of text could instead be used to identify specific marked vowels and segments within the words.

The service has a demo site that allows users to test the service out at up to 500 words per minute- a rate totally impossible under normal circumstances.

I managed to sit through and test all four speed settings, as well as read the various comments left on the developer’s open blog page. The main complaints were with visual strain, an irony since this is exactly what the develops set out to tackle. Users complained of black shadows surrounding the words after moderate periods of use, most likely attributed to the contrast of the black words on white background. I didn’t have any of these issues myself, or any difficulty interpreting the words as they were shot at me at 500 wpm.

Even as effective as the technology is, I don’t think it’s ready to replace how we read on a daily basis. When you are force fed words one at a time, with no punctuation, a lot of the context is lost. Sure, you’re taking a lot in at one time, but you aren’t given the chance to fully absorb what you’re reading. At the moment, the service is only good for specific technical services where context isn’t necessary, but I think it’s a solid example of where we’re heading, and how nothing stays the same forever.

The Consumer Electronics Show: An Iphone, Tablet, and Vibrating Fork

 

Each year in January, Las Vegas is bombed by hordes of journalists, PR managers, booth babes, and regular people with fancy nametags. They’re all headed to the same place: the annual CES tech convention. The biggest convention in the industry, the Consumer Electronics show has seen the unveiling of iconic devices like the Xbox, Palm Pre, Samsung Galaxy, and more recently, a vibrating fork. 

The idea behind it is actually pretty good. It is an aluminum fork that has a built in sensor, allowing it to vibrate when you’re eating too fast. A genius invention, sure, but more importantly it’s a telling sign of what the future holds for the event and its press. For the first time in many years, the media and the public alike are questioning the show’s relevance. 

According to Gizmodo,

The Palm Pre and Web OS made huge waves at CES 2009; Microsoft’s Xbox, unveiled in 2001 was another biggie. But truly important announcements don’t really happen at CES anymore.

 

Others have started to notice too, with well-known tech journalist Steve Kovach noting,

 

 

 

Steve’s on to something here. With the press firing off hundreds of tweets and posts a day, most of the important stuff is available to the public in seconds. Since there’s a set limit of what’s actually reportable from the event, journalists start getting competitive when it comes to drawing attention. The result is a ton of information that the public really isn’t interested in, and it makes it harder to cover a convention that really should be a huge deal to the industry. It’s only one example of how social media is actually hurting the journalism industry, and I’m afraid that if it doesn’t change for next year, we’re going to be hearing about talking spatulas.

 

The Tech Reporter’s Catch Twenty Two

It’s a strange time to be a journalist in the tech industry. On one hand, you are covering the tools and gadgets that end up making your own job easier. You aren’t tied down to your desktop, or even your laptop, when trying to reach out to your audience. On the other, it’s these very same services and gadgets that are working to make your job obsolete. Why would someone read a tech blog when their buddy on Twitter can tell them that the new iPhone is crap without leaving his couch? It’s a real issue that is changing how tech blogs operate in order to keep your attention and stay relevant.

So how do they fight back? It really only comes down to one option: staying one step ahead of their audience. Tech Blogs not only have to report on all the new tech services, but adapt their platforms to match those that win consumers over. The blogs that are able to pick the right platforms in time are successful, while those slow to adapt crash and burn.

What’s also interesting is that while their are many tech blogs with large and active user bases, not a single one really defines the industry. Engadget is currently ranked as the 314th most visited site in the USA, no small feat for a tech blog based in New York. Even so, it’s relatively smaller competition has left it no breathing room up top. The site has faced countless platform revisions within the past ten years, recently adopting a system in which users are able to post their own “mini blogs” in the comments section. It’s a real example of tech journalists realizing there’s no fighting the inevitable truth; you don’t need much to be an online reporter these days.

Tech journalists today use various methods of staying relevant, and bringing readers to their own level (ie. Engadget) is only one of them. Some are successful, some are not. This blog covers all of the tech reporters and blogs that work to keep you up to date on what’s up to date.