The internet is big. Really big, as Douglas Adams once said of space. You’d need an army of people to monitor it and find things of interest. Happily, thousands of people are doing just that, via Digg.
Digg is a social bookmarking site. When users find something they want to recommend, they can digg it, by posting a headline and short summary on Digg. Users who browse these headlines can also “digg” them, so the best stories – with the most “diggs” –  rise to the top.
Digg started in December 2004, and its main focus was on computers and technology news. Now, it covers eight topic areas, including world news, sport and entertainment. And as well as stories, it covers videos and podcasts. Each section has its own subdivisions.
So, for example, Entertainment has four sections – Celebrity, Movies, Music, Television – while Sport has 10. If you’re only interested in golf stories, you can choose those. You can also choose whether to see only the most recent stories, or choose a time period from a day to a year.
Although there are plenty of social bookmarking sites, Digg is amazingly popular. A top story can easily pick up 5,000 diggs in a week. The top story over the past year picked up 42,384 diggs, with “Apple Announces iPhone” collecting 24,000. Stories that make Digg’s front page can send thousands of visitors to a particular site.
Sounds perfect? Not everyone agrees. Digg founder Kevin Rose told Business Week: “The larger the critical mass of users and the collective wisdom applied to digg, the better and more relevant the stories get.” But crowds are not necessarily wise. Many of the stories that get dugg are sensationalist, and some are worse.
At the time of writing, the top World & Business story is: “ ‘I ate my roommate’, says teen.” In second place in this week’s Science section is: “Post-Orgasmic Women Agree: 15 sex tips to leave them dazed & amazed.”
The site says: “Everything on Digg is submitted and voted on by people like you.” Digg has tried to improve things by adding a Bury command, and by letting users digg or bury each others’ comments. You can, for example, choose to see only comments that are rated +5 or +10 or more, for example.
It helps, but not much. Digg has also been criticised because certain groups seem to have undue power in getting stories onto the front page, while a “Bury brigade” tries to bury stories that do not fit the site’s preferred opinions or, worse, are critical of Digg. There’s a fine line between “the wisdom of crowds” and mob rule.
But love it or hate it, Digg really does surface lots of things that would otherwise be missed. And that makes it worth visiting.
The Guardian