Blogging

Social news site Digg just posted some preliminary results from the site activity since launching its recommendation engine last month. According to a post on the official Digg blog from engine creator Anton Kast, all-around voting on the site has gone up by 40 percent since launch.

Other numbers that have gone up include commenting (an 11 percent increase) and some of the social networking, which went up nearly a quarter within the past 30 days. Part of the reason for the additional “friending” and profile views are due to the recommendation engine’s suggestion of not only stories, but other users you should befriend based on past voting. Kast says more of this will be prevalent on the front page of Digg for registered users as the engine continues to be tweaked.

Also quietly launched was a new version of Digg’s mobile site (m.digg.com), which still looks best on iPhones. New to the party is an improved topical categories section, and the option to view more than just the top five comments as ranked by the community. You can now load five more comments at a time, although there’s still not a way to rate or view all the comments from your phone.

Still missing as of Thursday is the Facebook connect integration that was announced as part of last week’s f8 conference. When in place it will allow Facebook users to log into Digg without registering–something we should be seeing from many third-party sites in the coming months.

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Digg’s recommendation engine boosting traffic, social networking

Of the 20 or so demos set out to bake in the afternoon soon on the August Capital patio for the TechCrunch party Friday, my award for the most interesting goes to Plista, a social recommendation service that follows what you like and don’t across sites.

Plista currently uses a Greasemonkey script. Once you install it, when you go to a site in the Plista system - CEO Domink Matyka told me there are about 30 so far - you’ll find the page has new Plista pieces on it: A rating box on each element at the least, and possibly more content additions too.

Plista adds rating features and feedback to sevaral sites.

(Credit: Plista)

By way of example, Matyka showed me Plista working with IMDB. I could rate movies on the site, and once I did, the service would show me other things it thought I would like based on the preferences of other people who liked what I did. What’s cool about Plista is that the recommendation engine works across sites, so it’ll recommend (in theory) books on Amazon based on movies you’ve rated on IMDB. And - also cool - it shows you your ad-hoc network of Plista members who have compatible tastes, so you can explore their recommendations.

Think of it as Aggregate Knowledge meets MyBlogLog meest Sphere, with a dash of Matchmine (review).

I like the concept, and I like how easy it is for site managers to implement the system: They don’t have to do anything. Plista does the lifting.

Unfortunately, I don’t get how this service is going win wide adoption. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem, for one: Getting a site Plista-enabled is a manual process, and while Plista can create the scripts for major sites, it can’t reach into the long tail to code them all. Plista will need site owners to do some work themselves. And there’s the egg: You can’t use Plista unless you have Greasemonkey installed. While it’s a popular engine for browser modification scripts, it’s not a mainstream add-on, so the potential audience is limited. And who wants to bother coding a site for such a small number of users?

Worse, many of the most important sites that Plista would work on - blogs, commerce sites, and databases - already have their own rating systems that Plista would compete with. I don’t see Amazon or Netflix adopting this system, for example.

I still like the concept here. Plista lets you rate products and content, gives you a lot in return for your rating activity, and it makes all your rating data yours; it doesn’t lock it away deep in some secret database on the sites you visit.

Plista does have a fighting chance, I believe, if it drops the Greasemonkey tactic and instead focuses on developing a way for retailers and content managers can port their rating data to the service, in return for cross-site recommendations and the affiliate revenues that would come with them.

Plista isn’t available yet, but you can sign up for the beta on the site.

More here:
Plista: Ad-hoc social networks for product recommendations

Fluther, my favorite Q&A site has launched a new feature Wednesday called “Your Fluther.” It lets you follow other people’s activity on the site in one centralized, easy to parse feed. It’s a companion to the built-in recommendation engine “just for you” that will feed you with questions based on topics listed in your profile and tracked site usage. More importantly, it’s an easy way to create a private group of users who you’d rather keep an eye on than the growing public feed.

One thing I’d like to see added to that feed is users’ responses to other people’s questions as many of the site’s best users seem to do more answering than asking. It would also be another good way to discover new worthwhile questions besides the centralized feed.

Fluther co-founder and CEO Ben Finkel tells me the site has been doubling in users every three months, which has been helped with a successful iPhone Web app and an overall increase in traffic from search engines. While Fluther has less users than more established services like wiki.answers.com and Yahoo Answers, I think it’s got a far more advanced offering with things like live tracking of written answers and a count of how many people are watching. There’s honestly nothing as cool as asking a question and seeing who is in the middle of responding before their post goes live.

If you see a user your like you can their question asking abilities with this new feed. Missing however is a way to track their responses.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Read the original here:
Q&A community Fluther gets personal(ized)

Fluther, my favorite Q&A site has launched a new feature Wednesday called “Your Fluther.” It lets you follow other people’s activity on the site in one centralized, easy to parse feed. It’s a companion to the built-in recommendation engine “just for you” that will feed you with questions based on topics listed in your profile and tracked site usage. More importantly, it’s an easy way to create a private group of users who you’d rather keep an eye on than the growing public feed.

One thing I’d like to see added to that feed is users’ responses to other people’s questions as many of the site’s best users seem to do more answering than asking. It would also be another good way to discover new worthwhile questions besides the centralized feed.

Fluther co-founder and CEO Ben Finkel tells me the site has been doubling in users every three months, which has been helped with a successful iPhone Web app and an overall increase in traffic from search engines. While Fluther has less users than more established services like wiki.answers.com and Yahoo Answers, I think it’s got a far more advanced offering with things like live tracking of written answers and a count of how many people are watching. There’s honestly nothing as cool as asking a question and seeing who is in the middle of responding before their post goes live.

If you see a user your like you can their question asking abilities with this new feed. Missing however is a way to track their responses.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Originally posted here:
Q&A community Fluther gets personal(ized)

Fluther, my favorite Q&A site has launched a new feature Wednesday called “Your Fluther.” It lets you follow other people’s activity on the site in one centralized, easy to parse feed. It’s a companion to the built-in recommendation engine “just for you” that will feed you with questions based on topics listed in your profile and tracked site usage. More importantly, it’s an easy way to create a private group of users who you’d rather keep an eye on than the growing public feed.

One thing I’d like to see added to that feed is users’ responses to other people’s questions as many of the site’s best users seem to do more answering than asking. It would also be another good way to discover new worthwhile questions besides the centralized feed.

Fluther co-founder and CEO Ben Finkel tells me the site has been doubling in users every three months, which has been helped with a successful iPhone Web app and an overall increase in traffic from search engines. While Fluther has less users than more established services like wiki.answers.com and Yahoo Answers, I think it’s got a far more advanced offering with things like live tracking of written answers and a count of how many people are watching. There’s honestly nothing as cool as asking a question and seeing who is in the middle of responding before their post goes live.

If you see a user your like you can their question asking abilities with this new feed. Missing however is a way to track their responses.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

See the original post:
Q&A community Fluther gets personal(ized)