Social news sifting service Digg has won attention and controversy with a new service. The Diggbar sounds like a browser-based toolbar, but is not. Instead, the Diggbar lets users created shortened URLs, based on the Digg domain. For example, a British press report about a Goldman Sachs legal move,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/5137489/Goldman-Sachs-hires-law-firm-to-shut-bloggers-site.html
becomes
http://digg.com/d1oRAa.
Unlike other URL shorteners, such as TinyURL, clicking on the shortened link doesn’t lead directly to the new page. Instead Digg frames out the page, keeping a toolbar active on the top. In the above example, the bar appears something like this:
Such links can be generated from a page on the Digg site, or by simply pasting in a URL at the end of “http://digg.com/”.
Commentary at the Digg blog claims that rolling out the bar has increased that site’s overall traffic, without costing other sites hits. According to Digg, their bar can increase other sites’ hits. Some commentators agree.
But controversy erupted. One search site notes that the Diggbar creates a separate page on the Digg site, one for each new link. “It also means that if you use the Digg short URLs, none of the link credit passes to your page. It’s all kept with Digg.” Others argue that framing someone else’s content is a discredited Web 1.0 era tactic. Some sites even developed practices for blocking the Diggbar (for example) (another example).
(thanks to Mike Osterman)
In: Information Literacy, Tools · Tagged with: Digg, social media, toolbar