Getting to the top of Digg

Stan Schroeder reveals the life cycle of a Digg story. The post is a fantastic analysis of how a story on Digg gets to the top, while others fail to do so. The key element to Digg's algorithm seems to be not the number of diggs, but the velocity of them: how many diggs a story gets per hour. Additionally, the diggs in the earlier part of the story's life cycle count for more than those in the latter part. Who has dugg the story is also important: the top users have higher influence.

The end of the Windows desktop?

Back when I was using a 80386 PC in the 1990s, I would start up my pc and the first thing that would happen was that a black screen with a C:> single command prompt would appear. Most of the time, I would then just punch in the following command against the prompt:
C:> win
This command would boot up Windows 3, a graphical user interface for your PC. More and more applications were migrating to this platform, rather than being started up stand alone from the C:> command prompt. In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, marking the end of the C:> command prompt as the base platform. The base had platform shifted to the graphical user interface.

These days, the first thing I do when I start up my Windows XP PC is to start my Firefox browser. From here I can access my email on GMail and connect with my friends on Facebook. I have even started editing my documents online using Google Docs. I can see the end is near for the graphical user interface we call 'the desktop'. The platform is about to move again to the Web.

8 ways to make digital content valuable

Following on from my previous post summerising some concepts of free content distribution that are being talked about on the Internet: TechDirt point to a post by Kevin Kelly that describes eight ways in which scarcity can be added to digital content to make it valuable enough to pay for.

I think the first two that Kevin points out are particularly compelling:

• Immediacy: imagine having tomorrow's content, today. What is interesting about this idea is that it is the opposite of the BBC opening up its Archive, which is centred around making old content available to viewers. Which would you pay more for: the next episode of Lost now instead of next week or an episode of Lost from a month ago? The answer to this question may vary depending on the type of programme that is substituted for Lost. In the same way that Jackson 5 songs have reemerged in charts of songs sold through iTunes, there may be some programmes that people will want to watch over and over again.
• Personalisation: in a world where there are millions of websites and hundreds of TV channels, determining what and where to consume your media from can be challenge. Amazon.com has for years used technology to guide users to the things they are interested in. Imagine you could have all news you are interested in - what is happening in your local area, the latest news to feed your addiction to Le Mans racing - all of this for the same price as an in print daily newspaper. Would you buy it?