Digg Hacked or Clever Advertisement?

It appeared today as if Digg had been hacked. If you visit Digg.com and view the page source, you will see the following in the code.

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However, if you notice the url near the bottom, http://hellisnigh.com points to a page which is advertising Dante’s Inferno, an EA game to be released shortly.

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Which makes you wonder if this might not be a hack after all, but rather a pretty clever marketing campaign made to look like a hack.

Update:

We just got an update from Digg and it is an advertising campaign and quite a clever one if I must say so myself.

“Since Digg’s early days, ASCII art has been ingrained in our site’s culture,” said Chas Edwards, Digg Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer. “We’re thrilled with the opportunity presented by our partnership with Electronic Arts and the Dante’s Inferno team — incorporating ASCII art into advertising on Digg, while providing the 40 million users in the Digg Community first access to the promotion code.”

February 3, 2010 | Filed Under Ads, Digg, Social Media | 25 Comments

Digg.com to Undergo ‘Drastic Changes’

Kevin Rose recently spoke in a surprisingly open manner regarding the site’s upcoming changes, and admitting Digg is in major need of an overhaul.

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“We’re making some drastic changes, but they’re much-needed drastic changes,” he admits, going on to warn Digg purists that they should brace themselves for the new Digg; “People are going to be shocked at some of the directions we’re taking. You have to be comfortable with completely tearing down and throwing away a bunch of ideas.”

While this kind of talk may worry those who have been Diggers since its inception, some see the site as rather old-school in terms of its approach to spreading information. This fact is not lost on Rose, as he notes that the web isn’t what it was when Digg was founded, and people now have much more control over their own internet footprint.

Those following Digg in the news as of late will likely not be surprised by the tone of this interview, as new features and adjustments to Digg’s formula have popped up here and there. It’s refreshing to see Digg recognize the changing internet landscape, but I hope they don’t go overboard trying to be more like Twitter and Facebook.

And, if a new, better Digg is on the horizon, well… we will just have to embrace it.

January 22, 2010 | Filed Under Digg | 1 Comment

Recap of New Features from Digg and StumbleUpon

While at Pubcon, WebProNews caught up with me and we did a quick interview.

We discussed the new trending feature on Digg and the beta changes to StumbleUpon’s complete site.

Enjoy:

December 3, 2009 | Filed Under Conferences, Digg, Social Media, StumbleUpon | 2 Comments

Digg Trending: Does This Belong on the Homepage?

On October 28th, TechCrunch released a screenshot of the new Digg Trend feature they had acquired.

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Digg Trending ‘identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not.’

Today they ran the first live test of the system on the Digg homepage, asking Digg users to help decide if the suggested story should be on the homepage or not?