Comments on: The Digg society

By: Britney

Britney — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 14:17:36 +0000

Hello world

By: Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 18:41:27 +0000

Mike: I meant Craig only as an example of critical mass of local community.
And I have to say that we had huge communities in Cleveland, Michigan, Alabama, and other nonNewYork places at Advance.

By: Mike Orren

Mike Orren — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 04:36:46 +0000

Craig is a great answer for classified. Don’t see that model working for news.

It’s not a question of a community congealing– you’re talking about five communities congealing.

And once you get outside SF, NY, LA, DC, Craigslist really hasn’t taken cities by storm. I used to believe otherwise, but we track them in Dallas and the growth has been slow. Beyond that, I’ve dropped any discussion of Craigslist out of business meetings in the Central Time Zone. I’m tired of explaining to people what it is.

Local communities can/will/do/congregate. I was speaking to your suggestion that a newspaper could operate that way. Perhaps it could in NY. But in middle America, I’d argue for a middle ground.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 01:10:45 +0000

Jeff: agreed, and you already blogged my views on that I love the contributor/reader model, but as of yet I don’t think Digg exemplifies a model that works. I don’t think it scales basically, and is too dependent on self-serving and mirroring audience desires to too great of an extent.

What happens in that situation is that the newspaper/newssite becomes a year book rather than a source of information. I think Digg is dangerously close to that.

What I would love is a model of reader-as-contributor news, and self editing that less serving explicit desire, and more anticillary/implicit desire.

By: Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 21:18:03 +0000

Ethan: I think it’s a quite legitimate question to ask whether Digg itself would work on a news or local news model. But I’m making the more general point that newspapers would be wise to see their readers and former readers as potential contributors, editors, and so on.
Mike: Yes, general news is a question. But as for local: The local sites I worked on had huge audience. And as for the ability of a local public to congregate meaningfully, I have a one-word reply: Craig.

By: Mike Orren

Mike Orren — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 21:14:41 +0000

There’s one problem with the “newspapers should” theory vis a vis Digg: Most newspapers are local. And I think there’s a question as to whether you can get all five groups clicking when you’ve got a smaller, non-global, population to deal with.

What would Digg be like if it was populated only by people from Boise?

By: Ethan

Ethan — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 20:32:33 +0000

Whilst I like Digg a whole lot, I’m becoming very jaded as to its relevance as a news feed for good content. I know its a signal/noise thing, but digg is supposed to FIX that, not cause more. Case in point: most digg stories fall into the following categories..

1) Digg is cool
2) Kevin Rose is cool
3) Here is a nice article on how to do something you should already know how to do
3) Here is a list of software you should have
4) The latest useless mashup
5) Videogames
6) Something funny I found
etc

This is just from looking at the past two days, but it holds true a lot. I think I missed the age group for digg about three years and a marriage ago.

By: Marina Architect

Marina Architect — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 17:43:56 +0000

Digg is picking up momentum. I would say look at Wink (http:/wink.com) for aggregation is vital. It is really the ultimate next itertion of search. As always, it has that why didn’t this happen earlier. Can Wink be applied to Memeorandum or vice versa and then served up like a search engine for world news? 2006 is going to be exciting. I predict Wink is going to be huge as long as it doesn’t get cut off from the API’s it uses.