[Infowarrior] - The Wizards of Buzz

[Richard Forno]

The Wizards of Buzz
http://www.freepress.net/news/20972
>From Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2007
By Jamin Warren and John Jurgensen

This winter, many parents across the country are sitting on the floor with
slabs of cardboard, box cutters and special rivets, and building pirate
ships for their kids. How did this happen? Thank 45-year-old Cliff
Worthington.

An English teacher in Osaka, Japan, he mentioned the box projects on a
popular Web site called Digg.com. Soon, supplies of the rivets needed to
make them sold out at MrMcGroovys.com.

³It would have taken me a year to sell that many rivets,² says Andy McGrew,
owner of Mr. McGroovy¹s, which offers free blueprints for the homemade
pirate ships and other projects.

The next time you visit a buzzy Web site, see a funny video clip online or
read an unusual take on the news, chances are you owe it to someone like Mr.
Worthington. A new generation of hidden influencers is taking root online,
fueled by a growing love affair among Web sites with letting users vote on
their favorite submissions. These sites are the next wave in the
social-networking craze ‹ popularized by MySpace and Facebook. Digg is one
of the most prominent of these sites, which are variously labeled social
bookmarking or social news. Others include Reddit.com (recently purchased by
Condé Nast), Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Newsvine.com and
StumbleUpon.com6. Netscape relaunched last June with a similar format.

The opinions of these key users have implications for advertisers shelling
out money for Internet ads, trend watchers trying to understand what¹s cool
among young people, and companies whose products or services get plucked for
notice. It¹s even sparking a new form of payola, as marketers try to buy
votes.

THE INFLUENCERS

Take a look at some of the hidden influencers deciding what is popular on
the Internet.It¹s also giving rise to an obsessive subculture of ordinary
but surprisingly influential people who, usually without pay and purely for
the thrill of it, are trolling cyberspace for news and ideas to share with
their network. They include people like 18-year-old Smaran Dayal, a
high-school student who submits some 40 stories a week on Digg and has
become a go-to source there for news about Apple. Diane Put, a nutritionist
in Idyllwild, Calif., known to Netscape users by her handle, ³idyll,² has
become a major source for health-related news on that site, which is viewed
by more than 1.9 million people daily. A Reddit user known for scoping out
striking images on the Web, Amardeep Sahota recently helped drive about
100,000 unique visitors to one amateur photographer¹s site.

Most sites are based on a voting model. Members look around the Web for
interesting items, such as video clips, blog entries or news articles. A
member then writes a catchy description and posts it, along with a link to
the material, on the site, in hopes that other members find it just as
interesting and show their approval with an electronic thumbs-up vote. Items
that receive enough votes rise in the rankings and appear on the front page,
which can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. When an item is
submitted by a popular or influential member ‹ one whose postings are
closely followed by fellow members ‹ it can have a much better shot at
making the front page.

Marketers and the merely curious have long tried to pin down how phenomena
from Beanie Babies to cardio-boxing get popular. Sites like Reddit and Digg
now raise the possibility that you can home in on the specific people who
generated the early ‹ or, in some cases, the first ‹ buzz. But identifying
these influencers is complicated.

WHERE TO FIND THE IN CROWD

Below, some of the main social bookmarking sites on the Web now.

Digg: One of the largest social-media sites in terms of submissions, San
Francisco-based Digg.com launched in late 2004 and now has about 900,000
registered users and 20 million visitors monthly, the site says. Digg¹s
content leans heavily on technology and science, but to help broaden its
appeal, the site recently added new sections for entertainment and podcasts.

Reddit: Reddit works similarly to Digg, with people submitting stories and
the wider community voting on them. The submitter receives one ³karma² point
for each positive vote and loses one for each negative vote. Condé Nast¹s
Wired Digital acquired the Cambridge, Mass., company in October.

StumbleUpon: Unlike most other social-media sites, StumbleUpon requires
users to download a toolbar onto their Web browsers. Click the ³Thumbs Up²
or ³Thumbs Down² buttons when you visit a site you like or don¹t like and it
will automatically post it to your page on StumbleUpon.com. You can also
click ³Stumble² on the toolbar and be redirected to a site another user has
voted on that matches your interests.

Del.icio.us: Del.icio.us is essentially a database of users¹ bookmarked
sites. The more other users bookmark a site, the more popular it becomes,
and the more likely it is to land on the ³hotlist² page. Started in 2003,
Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

Newsvine: Seattle-based Newsvine launched last March with a focus on what
has become known as ³citizen journalism,² amateurs reporting on the news.
Users post links they think are interesting, and also post their own
articles and opinion pieces, on which others in the community can then
submit comments.

Netscape: One of the first major Web browsers, Netscape relaunched last June
as a social news site similar to Digg. A unit of AOL, it caused a stir last
year when it began wooing top users from other social-media sites and paid
these ³navigators² $1,000 a month to submit links.To find the key
influencers, The Wall Street Journal analyzed more than 25,000 submissions
across six major sites. With the help of Dapper, a company that designs
software to track information published on the Web, this analysis sifted
through snapshots of the sites¹ home pages every 30 minutes over three
weeks. The data included which users posted the submissions and the number
of votes each received from fellow users. We then contacted scores of
individual users to find which ones are tracked by the wider community.

Though it can take hundreds or thousands of votes to make it onto the hot
list at these sites, the Journal¹s analysis found that a substantial number
of submissions originated with a handful of users. At Digg, which has
900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting
one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named
³STONERS² ‹ in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio ‹
was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories
that reached the most popular list. (Netscape, which gained fame with its
namesake browser, is now owned by Time Warner¹s AOL unit and operates a news
site.)

On Reddit, one of the most influential users is 12-year-old Adam Fuhrer. At
his desktop computer in his parents¹ home in the quiet northern Toronto
suburb of Thornhill, Mr. Fuhrer monitors more than 100 Web sites looking for
news on criminal justice, software releases ‹ and the Toronto Maple Leafs,
his favorite hockey team. When Microsoft launched its Vista operating system
this year, he submitted stories that discussed its security flaws and price
tag, which attracted approving votes from more than 500 users.

Besides an electric guitar and an iPod, ³my favorite thing in the whole
world is my computer,² says Mr. Fuhrer, who has lately also been studying
for his bar mitzvah in June. In spite of a content filter his parents use to
block him from viewing certain sites (including YouTube), he has managed to
consistently make it onto the list of Reddit¹s highest performers.

³I watch my son¹s page while I¹m at work,² says his father, Gerald Fuhrer,
and ³gush about his achievements to my co-workers.²

Pulling back the curtain on these hidden influencers is a controversial
subject. Many of these sites say it can heighten the risk of payola and
attempts to game the system. Last summer, some bloggers posted accusations
that a cabal of top Digg users were banding together to vote for one
another¹s stories, thereby boosting their profiles.

Payola schemes depend on the voting system these sites employ. Some
marketing companies promise clients they can get a client front-page
exposure on Digg or one of the other social-bookmarking sites in exchange
for a fee, according to marketers. To deliver on that promise, the company
then recruits members at the site, offering to pay them for thumbs-up votes
on the posting that links to the client. If enough paid-off members all vote
for that posting, it could theoretically push the client¹s link onto the
front, where it receives wide exposure. Digg and other sites say their
systems have safeguards that can detect concerted attempts.

Ground zero of this cat-and-mouse game is the headquarters of Digg in San
Francisco¹s Potrero Hill neighborhood. Here, dedicated site monitors track
every submission that comes in, looking for restricted content and evidence
of users colluding to drive up an entry¹s popularity or plugging services
for pay. Jay Adelson, Digg¹s 36-year-old co-founder and chief executive,
says refining the algorithms that analyze users¹ votes and determines a
submission¹s popularity rank is a constant process.

Last week, Digg took a more dramatic step, pulling down the user rankings
that had served as a prod to people on the site to post their best findings.
³It became a target for those trying to manipulate the system,² Mr. Adelson
says.

On the other side of this battle are companies like User/Submitter.com. The
site promises to pay users ³easy money² for ³digging,² or voting on, links
on Digg.com. Its offer is simple: Pay User/Submitter $1 for every ³digg,² or
vote, you request and in turn it¹ll pay a user. Users can earn 50 cents for
every three ³diggs,² and User/Submitter pockets the difference. At any given
time, a top submission on Digg has anywhere from 800 to 3,000 votes, meaning
a successful campaign could cost thousands of dollars. When contacted by the
Journal, representatives of User/Submitter.com declined to identify
themselves but said the company has successfully placed items on Digg¹s home
page on behalf of its clients.

In December, Digg user Karim Yergaliyev was banned from the site after
submitting a link to Jetnumbers, an international phone service provider.
Other users who said they were offered compensation by the company to plug
it ‹ but didn¹t accept ‹ had previously notified Digg of the offer. Mr.
Yergaliyev, who uses the name ³supernova17² online, says he didn¹t actually
receive any compensation from the company. Digg agreed to reinstate him.
Jetnumbers says it offered a free trial to 30 Digg users in exchange for a
mention on the site. ³It¹s my job to get our name out,² says Nathan Schorr,
business development manager for the company.

Though these sites are undeniably popular, there¹s ongoing debate about
whether the model of filtering content through voting ultimately will pose a
challenge to traditional media. Some say the voting-site approach can more
quickly distill what¹s important for busy readers.

But critics say it¹s simply an aggregate of borrowed content and links to a
relatively small pool of blogs. And while they sometimes drive traffic to
Web sites that are spotlighted, the spike can be temporary. ³Influence
implies that I can change your mind and they¹re not necessarily doing that,²
says Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University.

For 17-year-old Henry Wang, the job of finding compelling information for
Digg¹s 20 million monthly users starts when tennis practice ends. Mr. Wang,
a senior at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Ill., says
he spends three hours a day doing his Digg work, and highlighted his success
on the site ‹ at one point, he was ranked the No. 2 user ‹ on his college
applications.

After first posting some duds, three months after joining he says he finally
figured out what works: Focus primarily on science and technology, fields
that a bigger percentage of Digg users are naturally interested in, but
throw in the occasional oddball story to stand out. His link to a site that
explains the formula behind randomness in computer science earned more than
600 Diggs and a spot on the front page. His next post, a visual comparison
of the diameter between objects (protons vs. electrons, among others), also
rose quickly.

Last year, Mr. Wang took his skills to Netscape, which pays him $1,000 a
month to do what he was already doing for free elsewhere. It¹s his first
paying job. Mr. Wang says he doesn¹t talk about the gig with his friends
very often because he doesn¹t want to rub it in: ³They¹re working long hours
at Starbucks and I¹m at the computer all day.²

One site that says it has a lot to thank Henry Wang for is Famster.com.
Similar to MySpace.com but aimed primarily at families, Famster allows
people to set up their own sites to keep track of everything from photos to
family trees and blog entries. When it went live on August 7 of last year,
the site says it had only a trickle of visitors.

Five days later, Mr. Wang posted a link to it on Digg, with the comment, ³I
can¹t believe that this site isn¹t widely known, even with all its features:
share photos, stream videos, create a blog, upload files, keep track of RSS
feedsŠ all in Flash? and for free? Ridiculous.² More than 1,700 users voted
on the link, driving traffic to Famster up to 50,000 unique visitors per day
during the week it was on Digg¹s home page. ³I was in awe,² says Bryan
Opfer, the site¹s chief technology officer.

[Editor¹s note: For a look at some of the hidden influencers deciding what
is popular on the Internet, click here.]

This article is from Wall Street Journal.