With us today is top digger and the brains behind SocialBlade.com – FirstDigg.

1 – Tell us a little bit about your background.
I’m 28 years old, currently live in New York (the state, not the city), and like long walks on the beach — wait what type of interview is this again? =]  I’ve have been working in the telecom/networking/software industries since I graduated college (go UMass!) and am originally from Massachusetts.  I like to travel and have been able to do my fair share of both business & personal travel over the course of my life so far and have met many cool people in the process.

Meeting Israeli Diggers: MediaSight, TalSiach, FirstDigg, AllINeed

Meeting NYC Diggers: numberneal, FirstDigg, gbarberi

Meeting fellow YouTubers (some famous some not so)

2 – What made you first interested in Digg?

I’ve been a Digger for almost four years now joining shortly after the site was created.  I believe I first heard about Digg from the TV show The Screen Savers when Kevin was introducing it to the world. For many years before that I had been going to Slashdot for my news and Digg looked to be an up and coming replacement for old-style media. At the beginning I still needed to visit other sources because Digg just didn’t have everything, but I loved that anyone could submit something and you had the ‘preview’ of what was going on in the upcoming section where you too could help out and pick what was good and bury what was bad.  At the beginning I did a lot of looking around in /upcoming, but after a while it got overwhelming and I stopped going there.  A little over a year ago though I decided to try my hand at submitting and I discovered a completely different side of Digg, both rewarding & challenging but above all, addicting.

3  – What inspired you to create SocialBlade?

When I first started submitting to Digg it was purely to see ‘what it would take’ to hit the front page, but after the first day of doing that I quickly became addicted. I found that I was good at it and that I could use this skill to hopefully fill in some of the missing gaps in news articles that didn’t make it to Digg.  I then started to look around to see who was most successful on the site and started studying them a bit to get tips.  One of these people with Muhammad Saleem.  What he was doing on twitter was occasionally when one of his stories hit the front page he tweeted a [Digg Threshold] message with some data on # of Diggs, etc.  I found that information very interesting, but found that there was no way to find out how many Diggs a story took to hit unless you saw it at the moment that it did hit.  Since this information wasn’t available anywhere I decided to take a crack at the Digg API and see what I could come up with, and that’s where SocialBlade came from as a permanent source of this information for everyone.

4 – Tell us about SocialBlade’s improvements over time, and plans for the future?

Since SocialBlade went live almost a year ago it has added graphs, trends, and one of its most popular features, the top user listings.  The top user listing section though I can’t take all the credit for, though I’ve done a bit of improvement to it. Christopher Finke is the original author of that but discontinued it releasing his code.  I picked it up and integrated it into SocialBlade to continue to let people see that information. As for plans for the future, I’ve have a ton of ideas just haven’t had the time to create them yet.  One of the things I had wanted to do for example was create a sort of user portal around the site where you could create an account & customize what you saw, and also get alerts when stories you are tracking/submitted go popular. Hopefully someday I’ll get the time to create that.

5 – Views on Digg criticism / bannings? Surely you have something to say, as SocialBlade has the Digg Graveyard.

Lets be honest here, some people truly do abuse the system and do, even beyond TOS violations, and do unethical things to get stories onto Digg. There are sites that sell Diggs or automatically Digg stories for you and I do believe that those type of things shouldn’t be tolerated. That being said I am against the complete all out ban on scripts and I feel that many of the bans may be unsubstantiated.

I’m a programmer and a hacker (the good definition of the word) at heart and I feel that there are so many things that scripts can do to enhance a website.  Scripts are just tools which are neither good nor bad.  With tools you can build anything from a spaceships to bombs.

Just to illustrate the point, I use a whole horde of greasemonkey scripts across the internet to to add features to sites that are missing.  For example I hate having to click on the next page button time after time on websites to continue to use the site.  I prefer to be able to just keep scrolling down and down the page and have it automatically loaded for me, and on Digg, Flickr, Twitter, and many other sites I’m able to do this with a script called AutoPagerize. Just so there is  no confusion though let me say flat out, I don’t use any scripts on Digg to automatically Digg anything or any malicious or gaming scripts so if you’re reading this Digg, don’t ban me please!

So in short, I feel that scripts themselves should not be a reason for banning, its what you do with them & what ones you use that should be looked at. Also, the bannings aren’t really helping anything anyway. It’s the fundamental way social news is built that is not working right now.  That’s what needs to be worked on further.

Lastly you asked about the Digg Graveyard. When a digger gets banned, or “buried” by the Digg staff there is no way to know unless you try to visit their profile page.  The Digg Graveyard was created as sort of a community announcement to let people know who was no longer with us, and approximately what date they were buried. Since this information was getting passed around anyway, I just figured it’d be nice to see it all in one place and have it be automatically updated.

6 – We don’t see much of you on other social networks.  Why not?

Since I am using the social news networks primarily as a reader and not a marketer or blogger Digg does a fairly good job of delivering what I need in terms of news. I did use Reddit for a little while but I found its interface to be much less manageable.  If I’m gone from Digg for a few days and want to catch up on news for example I can, just start on page one and keep going until I see something I saw before.  This isn’t, or at least wasn’t the last time I checked as feasible on sites like Reddit.

Basically though, what it comes down to is this.  Digg has a good enough interface & enough sources to deliver enough of the news to me that I don’t have the time nor feel the need to push into many other social news networks.  So when submitting, I’ve dedicated some of my free time to filling in the holes I’ve found on Digg, helping to give back to the community there.

Anyway, regarding social networks outside of social news, I have become attached to Twitter & YouTube.  Make sure you follow & subscribe to me! =] I have accounts on other sites including Facebook, and Linkedin, but those are more to keep a profile and I don’t really do much with them.  If I was to measure the amount of time I spend on different websites online, probably at least 50-75% of that time could be split between Digg & YouTube.  YouTube is my other hobby.  Ever since I got an HD camcorder a year and a half ago I’ve been making videos on my free time for there.  Nothing all that spectacular but I entered one of my videos in a contest and won a trip to Singapore from it.  Diggers may also enjoy my April Fools’ Joke from last year “YouDigg” or a video I recorded from the Digg(nation) Meetup in NY last year.

7 – What do you think the future of social media holds? Will Digg make it? How about other competition social news/networks?

I think Social Media or Social News specifically does need a bit of work, but still has the potential to succeed in the future.  If an algorithm can be created to fairly and accurately detect what you are interested in and deliver news from the entire web in a timely manner that matches those interests to you filtering out everything that isn’t interesting to you then I think social news will defiantly be a winner.  Digg currently does not meet all those criteria, but I believe is striving for that. I think we are a long way still from eliminating ‘old media’, but I think over the next ten years social media (and Digg) will evolve to deliver a much more accurate picture of what is hot news in the world & interesting to you as a reader.

Digg definitely has a big head start, but if someone else beats them to the punch on these things it’s still anyone’s game.

8 – Any advice for those that want to become “top diggers?”

Most people consider “top diggers” to be the person who has the most front page stories on Digg, and while I do agree that is part of it, to me a “top digger” has always also meant being the must successful with each submit as well.  In addition to learning the ins and outs of Digg and how the site ticks, and spending a ridiculously amount of time on the site, I really recommend thinking like an editor.  After all that’s what everyone else on the site is supposed to be doing when digging up or down your story.  The biggest thing I can say is submit only quality stories. Don’t submit things just to submit even if you know that it will do well on Digg because its the right type of a story.  That just clogs up the tubes and is effectively social media spam.  If you focus on quality you will do well, become respected, and everyone will benefit.  That’s always been my goal.

Overall Top 1000 (sorted by Popular Ratio)

Top Active (90d) (sorted by Popular Ratio)

9 – Any final words?

Thank you first for giving me this opertunity to express myself and explain to everyone a bit of what I do.  If you’d like to learn more about me follow me on my social news profile on Twitter or my alternative profile, subscribe to me on YouTube, check out my site SocialBlade and of course add me as a friend on Digg.

[Today's guest post is from Crackerpat, a former Digg user.]

January 02, 2008 I was told about a social media site known the world over as Digg.com. Filled out my information and soon had an account. I started slow but as I started submitting my Face-plant and Nut-shot videos from another website, I started to get a moderate following and the comments I was getting from other Diggers started to fuel my intensity to Digg and submit more and more. Finally got a couple of the videos to go popular and I was off and running.

I was given the opportunity to use Greasemonkey scripts. I was told that this is what a lot of people used. With not much to lose one way or the other, I went ahead and installed them. What happened next was not what I was actually ready for. I actually became addicted to Digging. People would shout to me and ask me to shout their submissions and would shout back if they went Popular. Things were great. I was getting Submissions to go Popular and a lot of my Mutual Friends were getting pops as well. The only bad thing was that a lot of my submissions were getting buried because “Face-Plants and Nut-Shots don’t belong on Digg!” Even though They were Comedy section. Digging was Great! Then it happened. Digg Dropped the Ban Hammer.

Many of my Mutual Friends were banned for using The Greasemonkey Scripts. The same ones I was using. So I decided not to use scripts any more. Started getting more new friends, My shouts became golden again. None of my submissions were getting Buried and things were looking up again and then WHAM! I was asked to Log on before I could dig the comment… That’s how I found out I was banned. Yes I sent letters claiming I wasn’t using scripts and no they wouldn’t give me my account back. I understand why. Wasn’t using scripts… after the initial banning at least.

My theory is this, I was a dead man walking after the first wave of bans over 3 weeks ago. I was a middle tier Digger that was rising fast. So why didn’t they ban me and others like me 3 weeks ago with all my other fellow Mutual Friends? Because They knew then that I/ we were going to get banned in a couple of weeks later. I believe that Digg was using myself and some others that were in the Top 300 Users. They knew if they banned a bunch 3 weeks ago that people would follow what they wanted to adhere to as a Digger. And I did, but I was already gone. They let me and others get higher up the Digg ladder. They used us for their own benefit. As an owner, I do the same to clients on a daily basis. I like to think of it as Karma and I give them their kudos for using me and others to get what they want. I would do the same if I didn’t care about the people I was Banning.

There is a second part to my theory and that is that a second set of bans would generate more new users. How? Have you noticed all the Web Articles from the first banning? They have to generate interest. Sure they ditched a lot of great diggers. What did they get in return? A spike in interest. Maybe one like they never had in a long time. That would be the reason for the second Ban Hammer being applied. If they can show to their advertisers how many new users they get on a daily basis, wouldn’t you think that it would generate more revenue?

I don’t blame the User that gave me the Greasemonkey scripts and I don’t blame Digg. And as I hear the chime of my Digg Alerter for a dead Digger going off in the background, I realize that My Greed is why I am no longer a Digger and happy about it!

But as with everything else on the internet, Friendfeed isn’t perfect by any means. Just like everyone else, I have my wishlist of what I would like to see on Friendfeed and it isn’t a big list compared to what others want to see. I am not a demanding person. My needs and desires are actually pretty small.

I am actually caught in a dilemma at the moment with Friendfeed. It’s the same dilemma I face with all new applications like this when I start out. On the one hand, I want to only subscribe to people that I know and end up with a close circle of real friends. That way, I shut out all the unnecessary noise, information overflow and so forth. I see only the quality stuff and I am disturbed only by real friends.

But on the other hand, I am finding Friendfeed insanely useful for work purposes (especially now that a memetracker has been developed). The more people I subscribe to, the more links I find to click on, that lead me to stories to write about. In a way, you could say that Friendfeed is helping to pay my bills. But then that leads me back to the noise and the information overflow that I was mentioning just a moment ago. By going through the links, the comments, the Likes, and God knows what else, I find myself literally drowning. More and more stuff gets added to Friendfeed every second and you can easily waste hours in there flailing, trying in vain to get out, only to find that Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis are the lifeguards!

Which leads me to my first wish for Friendfeed. This was first wished for by Internet Duct Tape – don’t cross the streams! In other words, there has to be a way to stop the duplication of links. I often send the same link to Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious and then that link gets posted three times on my Friendfeed account. There must be a way for Friendfeed to see that it is the same link and for two of those links to get zapped. I can’t believe it is beyond the abilities of the Friendfeed developers to work out a fix to this.

Another wish on my list would be for Friendfeed to pick up my comments on blogs and aggregrate them to my Friendfeed. By having all comments funnelled to FF, not only would I have everything in one place but it would also encourage the conversation to continue. I have tried setting up a Google Alert for my comments and then running the RSS feed through Friendfeed but it doesn’t work. I comment on a lot of blogs and I would love for all of those comments to be picked up and deposited on Friendfeed.

Internet Duct Tape has also done some great Greasemonkey scripts that I think should be picked up by Friendfeed as default features. There is one where you can filter out links according to a particular service (so all the YouTube links or all the Delicious links and so on).

There is also another one, by Friendfeed Apps, where you can mark links to be read later if you don’t have time to read it at that moment. The links get moved to a “read later” tab which is very useful.

The one thing I found extremely amusing with Friendfeed when I started using it was the “imaginary friends” feature. My first instinctive reaction was “imaginary friends! I haven’t had one of them since I was four years old!”. But when Steve Rubel discussed them in his blog, I finally realised the value of them. You can use them to track people who don’t use Friendfeed or don’t have any intention of using it – in other words, a stalker’s wet dream.

So Friendfeed still has some way to go until it is my perfect web application, but it is getting there. All it has to do is cut down on the noise, aggregrate my comments, integrate and improve some of the features that some developers have made and Bob’s your Uncle, we might actually have a perfect web app on our hands.

Written by Mark O’Neill