Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

DiggBar Changes

| Date: April 15, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: digg, diggbar, web

Digg has announced that it will change the way the DiggBar works, which should pacify a lot of Digg's critics. Among other things, the DiggBar will now only appear when users are logged in to Digg, so that content providers will continue to receive full credit from search engines, without Digg's iframe getting in the way. Digg will roll these changes out over the next week or so.

These changes to the DiggBar's behavior, according to Digg, will also ensure that Digg's short URLs won't be indexed by any of the major search engines. Just last week, Digg's John Quinn told us that the company wasn't planning to use regular permanent redirects, but clearly, the protests over the last few days made Digg change its mind.

Digg also announced that an astonishing 45% of all the activity on Digg is now happening on the DiggBar, and 25% of all DiggBar users are using the toolbar to discover new content by looking at related stories. According to John Quinn, only a very small number of Digg users have disabled the toolbar.

If you are looking for ways to remove the DiggBar from your website, see here.

[via RRW]

The DiggBar is Still Evil and Digg is Trying to Fool You

| Date: April 10, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: blogging, digg, diggbar, seo, web, webmaster

Everybody was saying that the new DiggBar is evil and then so Digg added a link rel="canonical":
<link rev="canonical" href="http://xyz.com" />

pretending that the DiggBar tells Google where the real address is so all the link juice goes to your website, not Digg. But the fact is that the DiggBar's address is http://digg.com/xxxxx and the rel="canonical" does not work across domains, which means the search engine bots will completely ignore the Digg suggestions so the rel=canonical thingy does not work and is put there just to fool you a little bit into thinking they are not stealing your link juice.

Read about how to remove the DiggBar

Remove the DiggBar from Your Website's Pages Submitted To Digg

| Date: April 06, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: diggbar, firefox, greasemonkey, JavaScript, webmaster

Reasons to remove the DiggBar from showing up on your pages:

1) No Link Love from Digg

2) Ranking Tools Like Alexa won’t see the Visit to your site.

To remove the DiggBar on your website, simply paste the following code between the <head> </head> section:
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>

via tipsforall.wordpress.com

But that's for your own website. If you want to remove it from all websites you visit on your computer, simply install the DiggBar Killer Greasemonkey script.

Digg Gets Diggbar; May Destroy Short URL Services

| Date: April 03, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: digg, diggbar, url shortner, web, web app

diggbar
Credits: mashable.com
Everyone knows about the power of Digg. We've seen it first hand many times here at DLS with waves of Digg faithful pouring in when a hot story hits the feed. Last night, they've taken the gloves off and come out swinging at other short URL and social sharing services with the new Diggbar.

Apart from making it easy to submit items to Digg, the toolbar also integrates with Facebook and Twitter and can send links via email. There's nothing to install, just a simple bookmarklet that should work with any web browser. Click it and the page reloads with the Diggbar perched on top, ready to submit the page to Digg and share stats on previously dugg items.

Here is the Diggbar in action:




A short URL is automatically created for the page, and the Diggbar has one big advantage over other competitors like TinyURL, bit.ly, and Is.gd: name recognition. There's no doubt that the service will benefit from not only from Digg's popluarity, but also from Kevin Rose's massive Twitter following and general "star power."

No need to visit Digg to view comments, either. Just click the button and they'll appear between the bar and the page itself. The bar also includes buttons to visit a random site or check out related Digg submissions.

As if that weren't enough, Thwirl integration is coming. Once it's live, users will be able to use Digg as their default short URL service. Since the features have been made available via Digg's API, developers of other apps can start taking advantage of it as well.

Maybe Diggbar won't destroy the others, but it's sure going to make some serious noise.

[via Download Squad]
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