Making Digg Relevant

September 9th, 2006

The other day, Digg made some changes to its voting system. Whereas, previously, votes were not weighted in any discernible manner, they are now weighted based upon the, supposed, level of collusion that you exhibit with other users. The idea is that if you commonly vote up the same article as another user, then your combined vote is only worth one "vote" unit.

The fundamental problem that I have with this implementation is that if you're a normal, non-colluding, Digg user - your generic vote weight will go down as time goes on. The more you use Digg, the more chance that you have of haphazardly voting the same as another user. Eventually the system with find you to be in collusion "Three diggs together! Oh no!" and chop your vote to an invisible degree.

An excellent-quality article made it up onto Digg today (a seemingly rare occurrence). In the article, Pete argues that Digg follows a strict sense of Groupthink and conformity. I couldn't possibly agree more. I especially like his proposed solution to the aforementioned problem (while taking a different aproach than that of vote weighting):

To tackle the problem of conformity, do not show profile or # of votes for up-and-coming dugg articles. Just show the article link, with no profiles or votes attached to it. As a compromise, only show the profiles and votes on the articles that make the digg front page, but make them un-diggable from the front page.

I think the decision made by the Digg team was incredibly mis-guided. But it's immediate ramifications are tangible enough for them to make a quick decision concerning it. In my opinion, stopping colluding friends, or bot networks, is only part of the battle; stopping independent, rogue, users is something else entirely (and which I'll be discussing more, in the future).

Tags: digg, social, software

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Making Free Screencasts on OS X

June 17th, 2005

One thing that I've been looking to do, lately, is to create a Screencast (much like the ones presented by Jon Udell). I went through all the dirty work, trying to find a way to do it that was completely free - no strings attached. The result is usable (albeit, without audio or a mouse cursor) - and certainly a good start. I hope some more (free) screencasting packages get released in the near future.

Software to Install:

1. OS X Developer Tools - This package (which is distributed on the OS X install CD) installs all sorts of development goodies that are going to be needed for the next couple appliations. (Unless you already installed it, then just skip this step) If you no longer have your install CD, join the Developer Connection web site, and there should be a version available there for download.
2. X11 The next step is to install X11 - again, this comes on the installation CD. It use to be available on the Apple web site, but seems to be MIA since Tiger was released.
3. osxvnc This is a handy, free, application which gets you a super-simple VNC server up-and-running in no time.
4. Fink Fink is a repository of common, open source, pieces of software. You may also want Fink Commander, which is a nice GUI frontend for Fink (it may come bundled with Fink by default, check first).
5. ming - Open up Fink Commander and search for the 'ming' package (version 0.2a - not 0.3!) and install it.
6. vnc2swf vnc2swf takes a VNC image stream and converts it into a Flash movie - making it viewable by most of the Web-browsing public. I like to download this package and extract it to my /Applications folder. Once you have it downloaded, open a new Command Line Terminal and type the following commands: 'cd /Applications/vnc2swf' (or wherever you extracted your vnc2swf package), './configure --with-ming=/sw', 'make', 'make install'. You should then have a vnc2swf binary sitting in that directory, ready to play with.

How To Capture A Screencast:

1. Start osxvnc. Simply pick the default options and click 'Start Server'.
2. Start X11.
3. In the X11 command window that comes up, type 'cd /Applications/vnc2swf' (or wherever you extracted your vnc2swf package).
4. To start recording, type the following: './vnc2swf -nowindow out.swf :0'. Press 'F9' to begin recording and 'F8' to stop.
5. Now type 'open out.swf' on the command line to see your finished result! You will want to look over the vnc2swf documentation to see which options will suit your presentation best.

Happy Screencasting!

Tags: screencast, free, screencasts, osx, software, open_source

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