Digg Backs Down On DiggBar 180
Barence writes "Social news website Digg.com has made key changes to its recently introduced DiggBar. The browser add-on had been much criticised for its use of frames to 'host' third-party websites within the digg.com domain using an obfuscating short URL, thereby boosting its own traffic figures to the detriment of those third parties. After many major sites ran negative articles on the DiggBar, and even changed their code to block it, Digg has relented and announced two changes to ease concerns."
Do we really have to revive the 90s web (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do we really have to revive the 90s web (Score:4, Funny)
Don't forget the Blink tag. Everyone LOVES Blinkie! Or the little Construction Icons... mmmmmmm
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Don't forget the Blink tag. Everyone LOVES Blinkie!
Not everyone. Not me, anyway. The way I see it, there's a big problem with the blink tag -- it doesn't support an 'interval' attribute.
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Now THAT could be fun. Set them to blink exceedingly fast, but at slightly different intervals to "maximize consumer focus".
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Wanna know what you get, when you combine all the above mentioned annoyances into one thing?
Flash.
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well everyone has a comeback these days, so why shouldn't web0.5 return as web3.0?
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I hate this as well, and use a greasemonkey script [userscripts.org] to stop that behavior. Turning this off by default would drastically reduce rick-rolling and might even improve their bandwidth. Or, if they don't mind using the same bandwidth, they could start buffering the video upon page load. This would improve user experience for those with low bandwidth so that they don't have as much stuttering.
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I use Flashblock. It turns a Youtube area (or any Flash) into a play button. Perfect solution.
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"Slightly offtopic: why the hell does youtube autoplays the movies when you open up a page?"
Probably because 95% of their visitors would prefer that. Ever browsed a non-autoplay movie site with an average internet user? Sometimes a fair amount of time will pass before they realise that they have to click play to start.
Note that a DVD player will generally autoplay a DVD on insertion. Most CD players work in the same way, game consoles by default, etc.
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I have been on 1920*1080 notebooks for a couple of years and I have more problems with the unreadable foreground.
Every website seems to need several zoom clicks before being able to read something.
And don't even get me started on unzoomable flash crap.
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The irony is, of course, that one of the selling points of Flash is vector graphics, and one of the selling points of vector graphics is zoomability.
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Have you considered increasing the DPI/PPI in your graphics settings? It's there specifically to counter the tiny font sizes you normally encounter using high-resolution (PPI, not pixel count) displays.
I don't think it will help graphics at all, but it should affect most fonts.
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Flash movies zoom in and out just fine, at least on IE7, FF3, and Opera 9.
I too run 1920x1080 on a small laptop screen and have most everything zoomed constantly.
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You just described 90% of all Myspace pages too. What an era.
Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Facebook (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I like the digg bar. It's as unobtrusive as it can be, gives me a link back to the comments, and lets me digg a page when I'm reading it. I tend to browse diggs main page and open up a bunch of links all at once. Before the digg bar it was pain if I liked anything enough to digg it. Everyone should remember that it can be turned off on a user by user basis. Besides the fact that having it on is the default they are doing everything they can to not be jerks about it.
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I found it very obtrusive and annoying. Plus, clicking it off on every page meant loading the page twice.
For whatever reason, I can only log into digg if I use IE. It never accepts my login while using firefox; and frankly it's not worth the bother to figure that out. (On some articles on slashdot, it happens too, but not often).
As for linking back to comments, I personally find it easier to just open the articles and the comments with them in tabs and if I want to go back to the digg comments, I just cl
Define unobtrusive (Score:3, Informative)
For me, the Digg bar was very obtrusive. I'm forced to use IE6 at work, and when the Digg bar shows up on that browser on my work system (Win XP SP2), it causes unacceptable graphical tearing and glitches in the page it's wrapping. If I scroll down, I had better not scroll back up because I wanted to see something at the top of the page.
Furthermore, when I first noticed the Digg bar showing up on sites I visited via Digg, it was pretty easy to get rid of the bar -- one click to an obvious-looking close bu
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I find the DiggBar to be one of the most abominable things I've seen on the web since the 90's (and MySpace, of course).
Who actually reads the comments or actually uses any of the features at Digg? I've never actually met anyone who does that, but I guess if you do, the DiggBar might be slightly useful.
My biggest complaint is that they used a whole bunch of 'stuff is broken' to make the diggbar almost impossible to remove if you're using Opera.
The little drop-down button to make it go away permanently didn
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Because no one uses it as an aggregator for other sites. Most of the time is actually spent on the site, with the goal of creating or viewing content on Facebook, not going to 3rd party sites to view their content.
Well that & I just checked the Facebook website, and I didn't notice any framing of 3rd party sites (which might be the other problem with your argument)
Good point. There is a difference of purpose with Facebook. BTW, Facebook does use framing when following a shared link that does not have built-in support for the site like YouTube.
Browser bars make me puke... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm really just getting sick of Browser Bars and add ins to "help your browser". I think it is very ironic that Google Chrome's excellent interface is just one souped up text box that you type stuff into, with a smattering of buttons for favorites. Browser bars are just stupid.... unless someone pays me to write one.
Re:Browser bars make me puke... (Score:4, Informative)
The summary is wrong. It's not a browser add-on. It's a frame, loaded via HTML, like any other frame. It loads when you click a link on Digg.
Oh, frames REALLY make me puke. (Score:4, Funny)
The summary is wrong. It's not a browser add-on. It's a frame, loaded via HTML, like any other frame. It loads when you click a link on Digg.
In that case, I amend my post to "frames really make me puke.", followed by, "web sites that use frames to hijack other web sites really, really make me puke." I thought framejacking went out with the early 90s?
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democrats are not the only thing back in fashion you know
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What I want to know is (Score:5, Interesting)
... why is nobody screaming at Facebook about this, since they do the exact same thing that Digg was doing?
Seriously -- use the "Share" feature in Facebook to share a URL with your friends. Then click the link to read the shared story. The link will be framed with an obnoxious Facebook bar under a Facebook URL, just like stories shared via Digg were defaced, and with all the negative consequences that were associated with the DiggBar.
And yet while bloggers and SEO experts were up in arms over the DiggBar, I have yet to see a single story calling Facebook to account for this.
So if it's not OK for Digg to do this stuff, why is it ok for Facebook? Why the double standard?
Re:What I want to know is (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll take a stab at this. There is a whole cottage industry built around gaming Digg. It was a sweetheart deal, the "news sites" provided top-10 lists, tin-foil-hat opinion articles and short summaries of real news articles on real news sites mixed with a heap of ads. In exchange, Digg would give these sites enough traffic to make a living. Digg just violated the rules of this little deal and tried to take more than its fair share. Of course these guys are pissed--they had a deal, blackheart!
Nobody counts on Facebook traffic, so nobody gives a shit what Facebook does. But lots of these joints *do care* what Digg does cause if Digg shuts off their traffic, the party is over and the site folds.
Re:What I want to know is (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder, would cracked.com even exist if it wasn't on digg's front page every other day or so with another top X list... Not saying they aren't entertaining.. but damn, they have alot of them.
Re:What I want to know is (Score:4, Informative)
it's the fact that the frame was served to spiders. facebook doesn't do that.
It is amazing (Score:2)
It is a amazing the sheer amount of politics that goes around pagerank and search engine listing. In an environment where your whole business can go tits up with a bad listing in Google, it is no wonder such politicking exists!
If you couple that with the fact that nobody knows what the fuck, exactly, makes Google like your page and you get quite a strange brew. Books and websites all passing around spells and potions with no scientific basis. People constantly thinking Google is somehow out to get them
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Self-proclaimed SEO experts are just people who market bullshit - or, rather, see no issue in selling bullshit. I could do the same thing, but I'd feel like a scumbag for charging $500/hr for tips like "set page titles that people will want to click on when they search for your topic"*, "use your keywords in header tags", and "don't have broken links".
The best part of the nonsense is that nobody seems to doubt self-proclaimed SEO experts, and companies are happy to justify the exorbitant rate with the thin
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Oh, so this toolbar is a good thing then? The more sites that digg lists that go away the better.
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Facebook does not offer their goofy bar as a public URL-shortening service. It's primarily for use inside the Facebook walled garden. The DiggBar option shows up in TweetDeck along with bit.ly, TinyURL, etc., and you don't need a Digg account to use it.
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Re:What I want to know is (Score:5, Informative)
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That's because no self-respecting /.er uses facebook.
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That's because no self-respecting /.er uses facebook.
Are you trying to imply that self-respecting /.ers use Digg?
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Uh - try 43. Isn't it the 18 yos that are flocking to all these stupid sites? They can wire their cellphone up to tweet, fb, etc., but they can't code to save their lives.
Apart from having an apparent large group of virtual friends, what exactly does fb prove?
To be fair, linkedin is the exception to the rule. It has proven to be a good way to keep connected with old co-workers.
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Uh - try 43. Isn't it the 18 yos that are flocking to all these stupid sites?
So Mensa (which has a facebook page) is just a bunch of stupid 18 year olds?
Apart from having an apparent large group of virtual friends, what exactly does fb prove?
It doesn't prove anything and it's not meant to prove anything. It's a way for people to stay in touch with people they can't do in person.
Re:What I want to know is (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure there are valid uses. My point is that the implication that I must be on FB, myspace, twitter to be relevant is what is annoying.
They are trendy fads that serve a purpose, but their importance and media attention seems overblown, IMHO.
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Sure there are valid uses.
Then maybe you need to stop making such broad strokes with your statements. You said and I quote "Isn't it the 18 yos that are flocking to all these stupid sites?".
My point is that the implication that I must be on FB, myspace, twitter to be relevant is what is annoying.
Where did anyone make the implication that you must be on any of those sites to be relevant? I guess I missed that.
They are trendy fads that serve a purpose, but their importance and media attention seems overblown, IMHO.
The same was also said about email and IM just a decade or so ago too. Get off my lawn.
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"I came here for an argument."
Never mind. I made a silly comment. Obviously we could debate my broad statements for years.
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As for MENSA, having a high IQ does not account for conscientiousness or lack thereof. For example, I bet at least one MENSA member is religious. That alone smashes the credibility of the organization. And do they, in their infinite wisdom, realize that "mensa" is Spanish slang for "stupid female"?
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No, he's right. Facebook and Twitter and the like are for attention-starved teens.
And yet a huge portion of people on Facebook are neither teens nor attention-starved.
As for MENSA, having a high IQ does not account for conscientiousness or lack thereof.
Okay. That has what to do with my statement?
For example, I bet at least one MENSA member is religious. That alone smashes the credibility of the organization.
Why? Mensa isn't an atheist organization. Being religious in no way means you can't have a high IQ.
And do they, in their infinite wisdom, realize that "mensa" is Spanish slang for "stupid female"?
They probably don't care since their use of mensa is based on the fact that it's a Latin word which means table (also the root of the spanish word mesa).
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Being religious in no way means you can't have a high IQ.
It almost certainly means, however, that you're willing to turn off that intellect when it comes to certain topics. If they can do that for religion, they can do that for Facebook.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that it's for "attention-starved tweens". I do avoid most of these services, though, because they are essentially walled gardens -- a modern version of the early 90's Internet, where you were an AOL user or a CompuServe user, and one couldn't talk to the other, unless you had an account with both
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It almost certainly means, however, that you're willing to turn off that intellect when it comes to certain topics.
What relevance does that have when the requirement of joining the group has to do with the score from an IQ test?
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Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter are changing the way people interact. Whether it's for better or worse is a matter of opinion, and irrelevant to the discussion. Facebook has a larger userbase than all but about five countries have citizens - and many people in that userbase are more involved with Facebook than their own communities. If Zuckerberg wanted to get something done politically, he could easily broadcast a message out to hundreds of millions of people. He could make up some sort of complete
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Digg frames every link you follow, while FaceBook only frames those "Shared a link" posts. I've only seen the FaceBook Frame once or twice, and yes, it pissed me off, but I don't see it often enough to work up a real vitriolic rage.
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What I want to know is why people still visit Facebook and Digg? Both are retarded wastes of electricity and bandwidth. Facebook is just a meeting spot for pedos to find their next victim.
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No, it sounds more like a complaint about absent fury for Facebook.
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Furries? Fuck furries.
Yes, some furries fuck furries, but others just like dressing up.
The People's Voice (Score:5, Interesting)
There were no marches, no organized rallies; just a bunch of people complaining in a way that is heard by millions, including those they are complaining about and other users/customers of that company. This is the power of information.
Not the first, wont be the last (Score:5, Interesting)
Didn't about.com or somebody like them try this stunt back in the .com days? Remember having to add that "break out of some assholes frame" javascript on every page? I guess nobody does that anymore, but back then it used to be standard issue. Course, back in those days people used frames, so it was probably easy to break out. Looks like digg is using an iframe to host the content. This begs a couple questions:
1) What does something like AdSense think about pages served in iframes? Will it throw off their targeting?
2) What does this mean in terms of SEO? Will google get pissy about you being in some jerk's iframe?
3) How the hell do you break out of an iframe in a cross-browser way?
I gotta say one thing though--how they have the comments "fold down" from the "Diggbar" is pretty neat. Course, the posters on Digg are all 12 year olds who find poo-poo, pee-pee jokes funny thus negating everything.
Digg is a weird place, it is like some kind of flash-crowd groupthink that is enabled by the unlimited ability to vote anything down. Slashdot's moderation system may have its faults, but it is the best damn system I've seen for a website with lots of traffic. Here, you can make a post that goes against the general "view" of the site and still get "+5 insightful" provided you are eloquent. On Digg, you could write the most insightful damn thing in the world but if it goes even a tiny bit against the bias of the article you will be buried into the floor with zero chance of getting read.
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Slashdot's moderation system may have its faults, but it is the best damn system I've seen for a website with lots of traffic.
Indeed. I'm regularly surprised that /.'s moderation system has not been copied/implemented in more places. No system is going to be perfect but /.'s does work pretty damn well.
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Are you sure about that? It is served in an iframe, which would mean both your page and AdSense would see digg as a referer for all of that traffic. Something tells me google probably varies the ads it dishes out based in part on the referer.
Now granted, prior to DiggBar, the referer was already "digg.com". But the way diggbar works encourages people to hand out "digg.com/5849xdfs" instead of "yoursite.com/some-article.html". Those folk then use that "digg.com" URL i
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For example, if slashdot for some insane reason ran a story here and instead of using a straight link to your site, used a "digg.com" URL, you wouldn't know from the logs where all that traffic was coming from.
What if they linked to some bozo's link blog? I wouldn't know then either.
I do believe (Score:5, Funny)
This is the ongoing joke [diagnose-my-pc.com]
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That was awesome. I hadn't seen that.
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How the hell did a screencap of my mom's computer end up there, and who made it?!?!
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Why is your mom searching for sexy singles?
Hell, GOOGLE does this (Score:2, Insightful)
with their image search. Where is the outrage there, like Facebook others have mentioned?
Don't get me wrong, I hated the diggbar, and havent been to digg since they implemented it.
*sigh* No, it doesn't (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, google very clearly puts the original URL on the top frame, as well as on the main results search page. Did you miss the part where one of the major complaints is URL obfuscation? RTFS!
Re:*sigh* No, it doesn't (Score:5, Informative)
Also Google's image frame serves the purpose of providing the image directly, so you don't have to search through an entire webpage to find it. It's great for random image browsing.
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I don't like the diggbar, but it also has the actual url in the bar as a clickable link
Another reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet another reason not to use Digg
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Digg was never cool.
Didn't even see the Digg Bar Fail (Score:3, Interesting)
But I LIKED the bar! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:But I LIKED the bar! (Score:4, Informative)
If your content filter is fooled by the Digg bar, then it's a really, really bad content filter.
The URL of the site is still loaded on your computer whether it's inside the Digg bar or not.
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Backing down would be opt-in only (Score:3, Informative)
Changes don't appear as advertised... (Score:2)
...in TFA. The article says that for users who are not logged in (or who don't have any Digg account), the Digg bar should not appear at all:
I just tried surfing to a Digg-linked site, and the toolbar still appeared. I can confirm that I am not logged in to Digg, and I've tried this with IE6 and Firefox 3.x.
What I do see is a little disclosure widget ap
Fuck's sake! Why complain..... (Score:2)
Why complain when these lines prevent anyone from framing your pages?
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
if (top!=self.parent)
top.location=self.parent.location;
</script>
Re:Slashdot Bar in the Works? (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, I'll start:
Requirement #1: Don't even think about releasing yet another stupid toolbar.
Re:Slashdot Bar in the Works? (Score:4, Funny)
What we need is a "uber-bar" that puts all of the various other bars into a frame to help us out.
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Oh yeah, that's a great idea [seomoz.org].
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Can we get it to work with the Awesomebar?
I never thought I'd say this with a straight face (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I never thought I'd say this with a straight fa (Score:5, Interesting)
It has given me a new appreciation for slashdot moderation!
I acquired a new appreciation of /. moderation a couple days back when I replied to a very very helpful post and stated 'Mod parent informative'. I figured that having karma of excellent would make theirs (a 1 default) more visible and useful.
People did so and that post was boosted to a 5
Later in the day, someone saw my reply, and it got modded -2 redundant.
Common Pattern (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a common pattern. A comment arguing that its parent should be modded up will often achieve the desired effect, at the cost of whomever posted the "mod parent up" comment.
I had a similar thing happen when I posted a comment that initially got modded "redundant". I had then replied to my own comment, elaborating on what I meant, and claiming that the original post was making a valid point. This achieved two things:
A) the original post got upped to 5
B) the reply to the post got modded -1 offtopic
In its
Re:I never thought I'd say this with a straight fa (Score:5, Funny)
Overall I find Reddit's comments are better and certainly more entertaining than Slashdot these days. The first 20 posts top level posts here are always a mixture of Off Topic, Troll, or +5 Funnies that aren't actually funny.
Get rid of funnies and browse at +4 (Score:2)
Browse at +3 or +4 and change your prefs to get rid of funny moderated comments. They are very rarely funny and it really makes for a much better reading experience. Filters out the trolls and funny comments that aren't funny, and any real cream usually rises to the top as long as it isn't posted too late.
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It's not like the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, we don't have a "-1, Boring as hell" to counter the opposite end of the spectrum.
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Requirement #2: In case Slashdot does choose to release a toolbar, see Requirement #1.
Re:Slashdot Bar in the Works? (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't care what we think. They know we hate Slash 2.0. They know we hate the new user pages. They know we hate idle. They just don't care.
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I hate to use this phrase, but "who's we?"... I don't completely agree with every design/structural decision on the site, but I think that if there was an outcry of enough volume, it would lead to eventual change.
Slash 2.0 has its upsides, though it's still quite buggy (and I mean technical, obviously-an-error-and-not-the-designer's-intention bugs).
Idle? Ignore them if you dislike them so much.
I don't really have a strong opinion about the user pages one way or the other.
I very much doubt, however, that "th
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That's because you keep coming back anyway
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Depends on what you mean by "stealing". Is the targeted site going to get any kind of pagerank bump if it is linked via the diggbar? If people start passing around the DiggBar "tinyURL" instead of the actual URL from the target site, who gets the pagerank? I dont know--only google knows (which is why pretty much all SEO advice should be taken with a grain of salt, most advice is basically folklore and superstition... nobody knows what google wants)
In other words, technically