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Netscape.com is the latest major brand after Digg, Netvibes and Wordpress joining OpenID. band wagons don’t get any larger, hm?

fowa2007 - day #1

11.40 - Simon Wardley on commoditizing of IT: “there’s no sense whatsoever in setting up your own IT-infrastructure. maintaining your own web- or database-servers is what we call yak-shaving“. Zimki offers “pre-shaved yaks”, meaning a fully hosted, server-side javascript environment for rapid application development (not to forget Amazon S3 & EC2, which commoditizes web-infrastructure on a lower level).

13.45 - Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia talk about attention data, tag cloud moderation and past, presence & future of Last.fm. they also shared some stunning usage numbers:

15mio tracks are scrobbled each day (that’s 1575 174 /sec or 6billion tracks since 2003). there are 190mio artists, 70 mio tracks, 700k tracks available for streaming, 145k artist wikis.

14.45 - CTO Amazon Werner Vogels sells us on S3, EC2 & SQS (Simple Queueing Service) and encourages companies to compete on ideas, not on technology. currently, the 30/70-switch rule demands 70% resources spent on the technological “heavy lifting”, while only 30% go into the product/idea. posterboy S3-implementations include SmugMug, SecondLife (just for client-downloads), YouOS; renderRocket (a virtual renderfarm) is one of few current EC2-users. interesting detail: Mechnical Turk’s not internationally available because of conflicts with labour-laws.

16.20 - according to this post, Kevin Rose is about to make an announcement regarding digg later today. stay tuned for real-time updates

17.20 - Rose enters the stage… his talks’ topic is “the future of crowd generated media”…talking about the Digg-ecosystems, motivations for users to digg & submit content - Digg trys to buid incentives for users on every level (frontpage-exposure, traffic, networks of friends etc). he’s mostly summarizing what Digg has been doing the past two years. enhancing Digg (stuff they’re working on): how to manage a user-community of 900k, how-to implement fact-checking on stories (Digg does community-based, since a paid employees a la netscape.com won’t scale). Digg wants to enable/create connections between users based on several numbers - Diggs, buries, comments, word-strength etc. showing some slides on development of Digg-usage since 2005 + summarizing their flash-tools + announcing a “Flash Toolkit” later that year, which should help publishers monitoring their stories. commitment on APIs & export of user attention-data. finally the announcement: Digg is going to support OpenID in the future (also see TechCrunch)

that’s it for today…Wifi didnt really work very well, plus it’s not free maybe we’re more lucky tomorrow.

social-news site digg.com announced a major upgrade earlier today. besides some changes in user-interface and frontpage-composition, biggest news is the integration of online-video and podcasts in the top-level navigation. podcasts can be dugg either by series or episode, playback for both audio- & video works straight from inside digg. popular footage from social-video sites like YouTube or Metacafe pops up in a slick lightbox. unlike competitor Netscape (who’s been doing video since quite a time), digg is not hosting videos on its own servers, but is rather embedding the original material. while this might be an advantage over Netscape (after all users can stick to their favorite video-service and won’t have to upload their clips to yet another site), it seems awkward that users can’t submit videos themselves - currently digg seems to fetch only the most popular ones automatically. still, I think chances are good for digg to become the single point of entry for online-video… given the plethora of video-sites launched this year, a meta-aggregator is definitely needed.

unimpressed by the ongoing dispute between digg-founder Kevin Rose and AOL/Netscape’s Jason Calacanis concerning Jason’s lucrative offer to top digg-submitters, digg labs just launched two innovative data-visualization-features which might help staying ahead of Netscape.

the stack is a live-representation of users digging storys. each digg is visualized as a white bar dropping from above. each stack on the ground symbolizes a story.

the swarm adds another dimension by representing every digging user by a yellow orb - you can even track users as they digg from story to story.

both features are flash-based and give a great impression of what’s currently going on at digg. I imagine that visualization-features like this can massively increase the feeling of ‘liveliness’ on any community-website.

Janko Röttgers - author of the P2PBlog and the book ‘Mix burn & R.I.P’ - did a short email-interview with Kevin Rose, founder & CEO of social-news-site Digg. I’m glad to hear that the data-visualization-features I missed in the digg 3.0 relaunch a month ago are obviously scheduled to be launched by the end of july. Janko links two videos explaining the concepts of digg Incoming and digg Swarm, which Kevin outlines like this:

“digg Incoming: Think of incoming as a combination of an excel clustered column bar graph and the game of tetris. Every time a user diggs a story another block falls from the sky, causing the graph to grow taller. This will be one of the first tools that enables users to see real-time activities from several hundred newly submitted stories at once. The larger the graph, the more users are digging the story.

digg Swarm: Swarm is a graphical representation of diggers gathering or swarming around stories. On mouse over, swarm also draws real-time connections between stories that have similar diggers. The larger the bubble grows in the swarm, the more activity occurring within that story.”

btw, Max Kiesler’s DesignDemo is an interesting blog covering various aspects of innovative user-interfaces and data-visualization.

social tech-news-site digg is about to launch its version 3.0 on monday, june 26th. the most groundshaking change might be the new categorization of topics into six categories (technology, entertainment, gaming, science, world & business and online video). as Mike Arrington points out, digg has surpassed former leader slashdot in terms of pageviews long ago, and is now going to challenge the New York Times. a lengthy interview with digg-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson available at TalkCrunch right now is promising to unveil some of the other new features of digg 3.0.

update: valleywag.com reports from the digg 3.0 launch-party and features a picture of a new mindmap-feature, not unsimilar to the one found in feeds2…cool!

update: digg 3.0 was launched today… though the mindmap pictured above seems not to have made it into this release