Digg Backs Down On DiggBar

Barence writes "Social news website Digg.com has made key changes to its recently introduced DiggBar. The browser add-on had been much criticised for its use of frames to 'host' third-party websites within the digg.com domain using an obfuscating short URL, thereby boosting its own traffic figures to the detriment of those third parties. After many major sites ran negative articles on the DiggBar, and even changed their code to block it, Digg has relented and announced two changes to ease concerns."

Comments

Do we really have to revive the 90s web

[pimpimpim]

Remember: music starting automatically when you open a website, animated pictures, and of course, frames. What's the next, the unreadable background pattern

Re:Do we really have to revive the 90s web

[cripkd]

Slightly offtopic: why the hell does youtube autoplays the movies when you open up a page?

Re:Do we really have to revive the 90s web

[cerberusss]

Don't forget the Blink tag. Everyone LOVES Blinkie!

Not everyone. Not me, anyway. The way I see it, there's a big problem with the blink tag -- it doesn't support an 'interval' attribute.

Re:Do we really have to revive the 90s web

[nospam007]

What's the next, the unreadable background pattern

I have been on 1920*1080 notebooks for a couple of years and I have more problems with the unreadable foreground.
Every website seems to need several zoom clicks before being able to read something.

And don't even get me started on unzoomable flash crap.

Hell, GOOGLE does this

[cavtroop]

with their image search. Where is the outrage there, like Facebook others have mentioned?

Don't get me wrong, I hated the diggbar, and havent been to digg since they implemented it.

Another reason

[Rik Sweeney]

Yet another reason not to use Digg

Re:What I want to know is

[QuantumRiff]

I wonder, would cracked.com even exist if it wasn't on digg's front page every other day or so with another top X list... Not saying they aren't entertaining.. but damn, they have alot of them.

Re:What I want to know is

[tedgyz]

Sure there are valid uses. My point is that the implication that I must be on FB, myspace, twitter to be relevant is what is annoying.

They are trendy fads that serve a purpose, but their importance and media attention seems overblown, IMHO.

Re:Slashdot Bar in the Works?

[Hatta]

They don't care what we think. They know we hate Slash 2.0. They know we hate the new user pages. They know we hate idle. They just don't care.

Re:Not the first, wont be the last

[coryking]

So the advertising works like normal.

Are you sure about that? It is served in an iframe, which would mean both your page and AdSense would see digg as a referer for all of that traffic. Something tells me google probably varies the ads it dishes out based in part on the referer.

Now granted, prior to DiggBar, the referer was already "digg.com". But the way diggbar works encourages people to hand out "digg.com/5849xdfs" instead of "yoursite.com/some-article.html". Those folk then use that "digg.com" URL in their blog, which not only gives digg the link-juice, but probably throws off the targeting algorithms used by AdSense (and those like AdSense).

In otherwords, technically you are right, but I think you are oversimplifying things. You need to consider what serving in an iframe does to the referer.

PS: It will also fuck up your logs. For example, if slashdot for some insane reason ran a story here and instead of using a straight link to your site, used a "digg.com" URL, you wouldn't know from the logs where all that traffic was coming from.