A Review of Digg: Model for Social Bookmarking? - The Digg Effect
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Publishers dream of it happening to them. A page that makes it to Digg's home page has the chance of being hit by a slice of the ten million unique visitors Digg claims to have (Comcast say one million three hundred thousand). The Digg effect can be good, very good, or bad, depending on the user and how s/he phrases the comments. Digg is based on a democratic (and sometimes flawed) framework, which lets users submit, approve and even vet submissions. Quite often users are extremely subjective in their summaries of the information contained at the other end of the link.
The good part of the "Digg effect" is what makes publishers and web sites add the logo of the book marking site, with a call to action for readers to tag the site on Digg. The publishers hope to get favorable votes and hopefully travel to the front page. The bad part of the Digg effect is that, if the "editor" decides to portray your site in a bad light (or just decides to highlight your bad parts) you can get tons of very negative publicity. The audience may even be totally misinformed about your content due to "anchoring," meaning that they read something in the summary and on their way to your site, their mind is already made up about what they are reading.
You are also at the mercy of the typographical errors which these editors make. An excellent illustration of this was what happened when video game publisher Stardock was portrayed as wanting users to pirate one of their releases (Galactic Civilizations II). When the comment posted with Digg was corrected (after Stardock put up a rebuttal on their site), when the user submitted a correction, there was an error which switched the name of the publisher for the name of the game. The vetting system does allow inaccurate information to be reported by other diggers, but these does not take away the fact that there are trends in the postings that appear on the front page, which show that Digg may not be as democratic as it tries to appear.
Digg Tools, Digg Labs
Digg list tools allow pictorial representation of the activity going on; the site also features tools which can be added to websites or browsers. The features of Digg Stack (http://labs.digg.com/stack/) and Digg Swarm ( http://labs.digg.com/swarm/) really should be checked out to be believed.
Wag the Dog
Pareto's principle states that 20 percent of all input is responsible for 80 percent of all productivity, so 20 percent of your current phone list ought to be responsible for 80 percent of your calls. As you put this Industrial Age paradigm into the current Information Age we are in, you discover that the percentage is actually much lower than 20. The point is that some minority tail always wags the majority dog. This has been occurring on Digg, and has started a sort of war between the owners and users. Kevin Rose has announced that a fourth version of Digg which will reduce the effect of networks within the community will be released soon.
Next: Abuse of Power >>
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