READ YE, READ YE...
Alex Bosworth has a meaty post this Christmas morning on the "Dynamics of Digg", the OTHER major "social publishing" phenomenon this year in the blogging world (via memeorandum, of course). Others and I have talked about the Memeorandum a bit already of late, which of course has been the OTHER one to watch in this space.
Digg is often compared to Slashdot, which it's founders used as a template of sorts. As Alex explains it:
"DIgg.com has shot up from non-existence this year to be a net publishing powerhouse, challenging the longstanding giant Slashdot for the crown of nerd news. The way Digg.com did it doesn't seem too complicated, they allow the democracy of users to pick the stories instead of a short list of editors."
He goes onto explain in some detail how the system works, including his personal experiment on working the Digg system.
As Richard Mc Manus summarizes Alex's post:
"He discovered that the system is "very simple" and made up of five groups of people:
1. Readers: Alex guesstimates that "ten to twenty percent of those ever click 'digg'". I'd love to know the actual figure though.
2. Diggers: 10-20% says Alex. He also says these are the least important members of the system, because "once a link is on the front page, it makes marginal difference the number of votes next to the link."
3. Hardcore Diggers: "people who sit in the queue of submitted stories and watch for breaking news that should make its way up to the front page, or report stories as being spam or irrelevant."
4. Submitters: people who submit stories. It's highly competitive and difficult to be the first to post a successful story (one that makes the front page).
5. Publishers: "often bloggers who want to get readership for their content."
What's interesting is how all 5 of these groups interact - and each gets their own reward - in order to make the Digg system work."
Most of the social publishing startups to date have of course focused on topics that naturally incites passion in their readers, in varying levels of intensity. That's critical to making this "user-generated content" or UGC work.
Digg has plans to expand into other topics beyond tech, while Memeorandum already focuses on politics besides tech. Presumably topics like sports, music, arts, TV, movies, etc. are all fair game.
In some ways, these are the bulletin boards of old with a much more dynamic content ranking, rating, and presentation system, with algorithms doing much of the heavy lifting.
The BIG question remains ultimately how MUCH of the PRESENTATION process can be relegated to algorithms and how much remain in the hands of the various levels of human "keepers" of the system. Google News of course is an example of one end of that spectrum, with mainstream news presentation run entirely by algorithms
And of course, the question of the optimal business model for these sites also needs to be answered.
As I highlighted in a post earlier this month, the potential of these types of services is to help solve an increasingly pressing problem as web content worldwide, rapidly encompasses video and audio in massive amounts, in addition to it's growing text-based content:
"...What we need are dramatic improvements on how users NAVIGATE through informational and entertainment content. We need a new form of CHANNEL SELECTOR for the entertainment content, and a CONVERSATION SELECTOR for the information content...
And the big portals like Yahoo! and Google are still at the stage of adding ways for their tens of millions of users to access RSS feeds. Google's announcement yesterday of GMail Clips is a case in point, where they're still trying to figure out how best to design the USER INTERFACE for this constant flow of updated information.
A more important step forward, in my view, are the emerging class of what I'd call "NAVIGATION AND PRESENTATION" services I discussed in a previous post like Memeorandum, Digg, and others, that automatically crawl, index, and PRESENT content along themes and areas of interest. These nascent services point to the next step TOWARDS the ultimate solution to this content DISCOVERY and PRESENTATION problem.
We're going to need the "Keep it as Simple as Possible for mainstream audiences" ethos of AOL a decade ago, if we're to see mass market adoption of these fancy, useful, but still very complicated to use and consume Web 2.0 technologies and services."
Digg, Memeorandum and other emerging services like it are simpler, Web 2.0 versions of an approach to creating, ranking and presenting UGC that has already gone mainstream in other countries like South Korea. The post child example of course, is "OhMyNews", which as Wikipedia explains:
"OhmyNews.com is a South Korean online newspaper with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000.
It is the first of its kind in the world to accept, edit and publish articles from its readers, in an open source style of news reporting. About 20% of the site's content is written by the 55-person staff while the majority of articles are written by other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens. OhmyNews' citizen reporters now number 39,000.
OhmyNews was influential in determining the outcome of the South Korean presidential elections in December 2002 with the election of Roh Moo Hyun."
So, a long way to go before this approach truly becomes mainstream in the US.
In the meantime, it's great to find new stuff to read every day via these systems. I'm particularly jazzed by Digg's latest feature, "The Digg Spy", which is a REAL-TIME view of the content being fed into Digg.
It reminds me of the plasma screen in the lobby of Google from it's early days, showing the live "searches" by an exploding number of users.
Mesmerizing...until of course the cacophony of real life jarred me back into the here and now of Christmas morn.
P.S. Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah everybody!
Comments