That Damned DiggBar

Oh dear. Digg launched a new ‘feature’ last week which has rather upset a few people.

The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services.

The DiggBar frames the target web page, adds a few adverts for good measure, and then presents it under a TinyURL style short link. In short, this is what can be expected by website owners who have their pages framed by Digg:

  • Your site will be displayed as normal, but your URL will be lost. The user has no way of bookmarking your page directly, and no way of returning to it.
  • Similarly, the user cannot copy and paste your URL.
  • The user’s browser history will simply read as a long list of Digg URLs.
  • Digg’s traffic will be artificially inflated.
  • Digg will be able to serve adverts to your users, and make money from them. The more popular your site, the more money Digg make.
  • Digg will get all link credit for your content.

This makes it incredibly difficult for a new site (such as this one) to generate any sort of link equity. This has caused a lot of anger, and has led to the release of a DiggBar blocker for almost every web publishing platform you can think of  ((Diggbar Blockers: PHP, WordPress, Greasemonkey (Firefox scripts), ExpressionEngine, Django, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (This redirects users to your page sans-DiggBar rather than blocking) and Drupal)).

I have implemented this JavaScript Solution which redirects users to the intended destination minus DiggBar and with the correct URL intact. Try it out by following this link.

And just for an added layer of hypocrisy, here is a rant from Digg co-founder Kevin Rose when he found another site was framing the web page of his Diggnation podcast.

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