Revised Plan To Make Worthy Digg Stories Popular

[LibertyCzar]

I've divided all 24 hours of the day into six 4-hour time blocks and placed them into a poll, starting and ending at Midnight in the Eastern time zone (9:00 pm Pacific time). Most Digg stories will last at least four hours. The purpose of this poll is to determine what time of day is best to post a story on Digg.

I have looked at some comments and feedback on the previous plan. One thing I have come to realize is that we need organization. We also need to limit repeat posts. We need to limit overall posts. But we also need to post Digg stories in the proper place. That can be in Election 2008, or Political Opinion, or Political News, but never in more than one place.

My plan would have all Digg stories posted here on this forum first, except for all entries made by Ron Paul's campaign, such as the one posted yesterday regarding immigration. Furthermore, once a Digg story has been submitted, the person submitting the story should include that the story has been approved by the Ron Paul Forum. If a story about Ron Paul has been added to Digg without being first submitted here, we should gently comment on that story that the Ron Paul Supporter Community would prefer that stories be vetted on this forum before being placed on Digg.

Finally, we should make the commitment to Bury all repeat Ron Paul stories, and to Comment why we are Burying each story, and to point out where the original first posting of that story has been posted.

I know, this isn't perfect, but it accomplishes more of what I was trying to have accomplish before, but with organized restraint. We should make sure that all press releases by Ron Paul's campaign are made popular. That is the least we could do. His immigration press release was buried before it could be made popular.

[UtahApocalypse]

This could be a step in the right direction. It can be hard to "bury" a RP article but it is somewhat needed. I have been trying to digg the good articles, and bury dupes, spam, and very short articles. When I bury I always leave a comment as to why I have done so. It would be better to police ourselves then to get the digg community against RP for being over zealous.

[LibertyEagle]

LibertyCzar,

I think that is a great idea. We have to police ourselves. Right now, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

[DjLoTi]

I really like the direction you're going with this. I think this is one way we can be a stronger community with a more powerful message.

[LibertyCzar]

Digg stories that should always be made popular are the ones directly from Ron Paul's website, when we are told to Digg the article. I would also like to see a weekly roundup summary of everything relevant that happened during the previous week. Sunday might be the best day for such a thing. Someone could make a blog entry. This would combine everything into one article. Besides that, anything significant could be vetted here.

[tsoldrin]

I'm all for burying the duplicates. I already bury more than I digg... the nature of digg and anything popular creates a lot of duplicates for every popular story to begin with. Keep in mind too that stories submitted close in time are probably accidentally duplicated. It takes digg a while to index new articles and before it does, the first one won't show up on upcoming, search or the checker that asks you if it's a duplicate story. Honest mistakes are made, so no need to yell at them (although I sometimes do) just bury as duplicate.

That brings me to this vetting process... by the time any story is vetted here, it's going to already be submitted to digg (probably a few times)... so if we go ahead and submit, we'll be adding to the duplicate problem ourselves. I can't see any way around this, because it's just the nature of digg... many diggers leap at the first opportunity to be the first to submit a new story. Even if all of the Ron Paul fans were working together on this (impossible!) there would still be other folks submitting the stories before we finished vetting stuff. It's a great idea, but I just don't know that it'll work... unless somehow we can add a speed element into the vetting process (as in it would have to be under 15 minutes).

On the rss thing.... check out this blog (http://tsoldrin.blogspot.com) on the left under "Ron Paul Diggables". That's an RSS feed that I set up real quick right after reading this message. What I did was take the rss from my diggs (which digg provides) and the rss from two other Ron Paul diggers I just happened to know off the top of my head (one had posted on the previous thread on this) and combined them using Google Reader into a single feed, then I ran it through Feedburner. The feedburner step probably isn't absolutely needed, but it has some bells and whistles I like and it's fast, also the google widget to add feeds to sites sometimes chokes up and doesn't update for days, the feedburner one doesn't. What this will do is simply give a link list of everyone's diggs who is included and added to the feed. I am still not sure how well it crops out duplicate, so that's something to wait and see.

There are alternate ways to do this... someone could take two feeds and move items from one to the other on approval... I didn't do this because I don't have the time to monitor the feeds all the time (I'm moving), so I set it up to pretty much run on it's own without fiddling. Another alternative is to use the digg provided "Agreed on" rss feed for someone with the perfect friends list... I didn't do THAT because my friends list has a lot of agreed on non-Paul material in it, but someone else might be a better candidate for that option.

Finally, my own interests and thus diggs have a lot of conspiracy realted stuff as well as intelligence and mid east affairs in there, so my digg feed should be removed (I just added it to make this example) and someone more Ron Paul centric should be added... someone who is careful not to digg duplicates and probably several someones from different time zones should be added in fact.

Anyway... there's got to be some RSS savy folks on here... thoughts?

If interested, here's the code to add the above feed to a site:


<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ron-paul-diggablesViaTsoldrinInGoogleReader?format=sigpro" type="text/javascript" ></script><noscript><p>Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ron-paul-diggablesViaTsoldrinInGoogleReader"></a><br/>Powered by FeedBurner</p> </noscript>

It can be styled with CSS, I'll have to post instructions for that later though... as is, it should adopt the style of the page it's put on.

Oh one of the bells and whistles of feedburner is this graphic:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ron-paul-diggablesViaTsoldrinInGoogleReader.1.gif (http://feeds.feedburner.com/ron-paul-diggablesViaTsoldrinInGoogleReader)

[tsoldrin]

Sort of an offshoot ideas... I think another use we can make of RSS is some sort ACTION ALERT system, since there's a pile of ways you can get rss feeds, through an rss reader, through e-mail alerts and there's a pile of widgets that allow you to add them to pretty much any web page or even to your desktop... we could issue alerts via rss... perhaps one high volume one for folks with lots of time and one low volume one for extreme emergencies.... stuff like this: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=3680 would be a good example of an emergency alert... and for other stuff it could just point people to stories that needed commenting on and whatnot. There's a bigger world out there than digg!

[Bryan]

Sort of an offshoot ideas... I think another use we can make of RSS is some sort ACTION ALERT system, since there's a pile of ways you can get rss feeds, through an rss reader, through e-mail alerts and there's a pile of widgets that allow you to add them to pretty much any web page or even to your desktop... we could issue alerts via rss... perhaps one high volume one for folks with lots of time and one low volume one for extreme emergencies....
There is an RSS here, it's on a forum-by-forum basis:
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=2292

An RSS for the "online action" sub-forum is as follows:
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/external.php?type=rss&forumids=44

If there is demand there can be a dedicated an "Alert" sub-forum made for RSS purposes to do what you're saying.

[mesler]

I actually had a prototype of this setup a few weeks ago. Shortly after, some disgruntled digger accused myself and others of violating the Digg TOU. I created a category called "Digg Action Alert" or something like that, had one test item out there, and my site got mentioned (the Digg article was something like '10 sites that violate the Digg TOS.')

So I strongly recommend removing the premeditated timed digging, and stick with promoting the diggable idea as widely as possible. I'm not sure if it's a violation of the following term, but it is gray:

" with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the 'digg count', blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg's services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg's services."


To reiterate, what would make this kosher would be to simply publicise the diggable rss feed as a valid news source. It won't be a violation of the TOU, and it will still give folks a way to focus their diggs.

[LibertyCzar]

What has happened on Digg today is the reason why I have pointed out that we need an organized effort to make the stories we feel are important reach the front page. There is definitely an element out there stiffling these stories.

[LibertyCzar]

We need to resubmit to Digg today about the Iowa situation. We need a good connecting story. And we need to make sure it gets popular.

[tsoldrin]

I don't know if it's going to work... I had an article on digg yesterday that was buried, and I have zero hits in my log from digg.com... so people aren't even reading them, they just auto-bury anything with 'Ron Paul' in it. Maybe we should hit the other places... reddit.com, shoutwire.com, netscape.com, newsvine.com for a while...

[LibertyCzar]

I suspect you are right. But I think some Ron Paul articles are buried because of the comments added. If someone feels they are losing an argument in the comments, they'll just decide to Bury the thing and go elsewhere.

[LibertyCzar]

Are only seven willing to use Digg as a venue?