A week ago our class read and discussed an article titled, How Dig.com is democratizing the news. The subject of this article is the Intenet site Digg.com. This site was founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose and today has more than 180,000 registered users and serves up 6 million pages every day. Digg is a user driven social content website. What this means is that everything on Digg is submitted by its community of users which are its registered users. After a user submits an article a video or any other content, other people read and view ths submission and Digg what they like best. If the story becomes popular and receives enough Diggs (user endorsement), it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see. Each registered user who supplies the content to the site determines what news, videos and podcasts will appear on the site. The site refers to itself as a digital media democracy. The concept of Digg is not original. Rose admits that his site was inspired by and is a combination of such sites as Slashdot, MySpace, and Del.icio.us. These are are all community-driven website however unlike these Dig.com allows users to view all the submitted stories. Dig gives complete control to the community. If a story or video has many Digs -they are then elevated to the homepage.
I found the concept of this site very interesting so I decided to explore it further on my own by visiting the site its self and reading about it on wikipedia. It is obvious by the fact that it has a very large user base and that there are rumors that Yahoo wants to buy it that this site is extremely popular. I was a little disappointed to learn that the one story that catapulted this site to "stardom" was when Paris Hilton's cell phone was hacked, someone close to the perpetrator posted a blog item about it to Digg, and the story quickly hit the homepage. The next morning, Digg was the No. 1 result in both Yahoo and Google. This episode would make Digg appear to be no more than a tabloid. The Digg content is however much broader and wide ranging. It contains articles on science, technology, current news, politics and entertainment. Moreover, its content is ever expanding and is really limitless. Many criticisms have been directed at Diggs. Some feel that users have too much control over content, allowing things to be blown out of proportion and misinformation to flourish. The site has also allowed stories to appear on its site that companies paid for. Another criticism that I find particularly disturbing is that faulty or misleading articles can reach many users quickly, blowing out of proportion the unsupported claims or accusations. I guess this type of criticism can be aimed at the whole internet. It has also been reported that the top 100 Digg users controlled 56% of Digg's frontpage content, and that a small group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage content.
I found the concept of this site very interesting so I decided to explore it further on my own by visiting the site its self and reading about it on wikipedia. It is obvious by the fact that it has a very large user base and that there are rumors that Yahoo wants to buy it that this site is extremely popular. I was a little disappointed to learn that the one story that catapulted this site to "stardom" was when Paris Hilton's cell phone was hacked, someone close to the perpetrator posted a blog item about it to Digg, and the story quickly hit the homepage. The next morning, Digg was the No. 1 result in both Yahoo and Google. This episode would make Digg appear to be no more than a tabloid. The Digg content is however much broader and wide ranging. It contains articles on science, technology, current news, politics and entertainment. Moreover, its content is ever expanding and is really limitless. Many criticisms have been directed at Diggs. Some feel that users have too much control over content, allowing things to be blown out of proportion and misinformation to flourish. The site has also allowed stories to appear on its site that companies paid for. Another criticism that I find particularly disturbing is that faulty or misleading articles can reach many users quickly, blowing out of proportion the unsupported claims or accusations. I guess this type of criticism can be aimed at the whole internet. It has also been reported that the top 100 Digg users controlled 56% of Digg's frontpage content, and that a small group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage content.
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