DiggBar Is Here. Go Shorten Those URLs

This is very disappointing.

I run a niche social news site, so I've spent hours and hours comparing and studying what's out there.

Most social news sites are, spammy SERP factories. They lift other people's content in the hope of getting enough Google mojo that their site will outrank the original source of the content in SERPS. That's the business model.

For a long time, the easiest way to tell the difference between a legit aggregator and a crummy one was to see where their headlines pointed.

If you go to a crummy aggregator like Mixx.com, the headlines on the front page don't point you to the site whose content they're lifting, they point you to a Mixx summary page where there's just a single blue link that will lead you to the source of the information.

Obviously this is done to boost pageviews and to keep the user on the site, rather than letting them get to the information they're looking for.

This always seemed like the obvious way to do things. Lame, too.

And yet Digg and Reddit's headlines have always sent you to the actual sites. And I really, really respected them for this. Whenever I'd see a new social news site doing something sketchy, I'd take comfort in the fact that the two biggest players were also the ones taking the most generous, "good" approaches.

I guess it was only a matter of time before one of them gave in and did something that's actually worse in some respects than directing to a summary page: hijacking the brand, URL, and advertising of the sites that it links to.

Digg is a very influential site. As disappointed as I am in the company for doing this, I'm even more worried about other sites looking at this and saying "fuck it, we're doing it too, now."

Imagine if every link on CNN, NYTimes, MSNBC, WashingtonPost.com led to framed pages.

We all complain about mainstream news never linking to the sites it covers. Well as soon as they figure out how to frame all outbound links and run ads around them, you can bet they'll be linking out all the time.

The bar has been lowered.

Hulu via Digg Via Facebook looks great.

Hulu via Outbrain via Digg via Facebook looks even better.

Observervation: The Facebook frame does not allow other sites to frame it! The same goes for the Stumbleupon frame as far as I can tell.

Death to framers.

I should get some shirts that say that printed up.

Counting these framed pageviews as Digg pageviews is at least dishonest to advertisers and at most plain wrong.

According to Center Networks, the Digg toolbar is running Digg's Quantcast code. So it looks like they're going to try to do just that.

http://www.centernetworks.com/diggbar-analytics-ads-pageview...