Can you imagine anyone writing a song about the New York Times or Good Morning, America, or, for that matter, Yahoo? No. But here’s a song about Digg:
Now a cynic might say that young Kina Grannis wrote this song about Digg so it would get Dugg (4,178 times, at last count) and so many young (geeky and possibly lonely) guys would discover kismet with a very pretty girl and do what she says: namely, vote for her in a Doritos contest to have her video shown on the SuperBowl. A cynic would say that but I wouldn’t. She’s too young and fresh to be grizzled.
And the lesson I prefer to take away is that the successful media brands of the future will be the ones that are owned and loved and promoted by their users (formerly known as their audience).
The fanboys can be tiresome, they always are outspoken
And if you’re listening Kevin Rose, the comment system’s broken!
I know digg isn’t perfect, but be thankful for what we’ve got
It’s just like daddy always says: “At least it’s not Slashdot!!!â€
Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!
Anyone care to try to write lyrics for a New Yorker theme?
Digg, the social news site, has created pages for all the candidates and already, there’s a rush to follow and befriend them. Tops on the Republican side: Ron Paul by a gigantic margin (they are a tenacious bunch, those Paulites… or are they the Ronnies?), followed by Huckabee, Thompson, Romney, then Giuliani. On the Democratic side: Obama followed by Kucinich (!), Gravel (!), Edwards, Clinton, and Biden.
True to form, Diggers find the stories that are overlooked in mainstream media. They’re also generally befriending the candidates overlooked by MSM.
Kevin Rose — looking a bit Big Brothery on a webcast to the stage at Next Web in Amsterdam — reveals that Digg is working on expanding to reviews of restaurants, products, service, images and is also working on improved means of discovery. Wherever there is “an overabundance of information” that could benefit from collaborative filtering, Rose says, Digg will be there.
Beware, newspapers, beware. Just as you all are trying to figure out ways to get people to share what they know about local restaurants, businesses, and such — an effort that supposedly has gone on for years but has yielded bupkis in results — in swoops Digg with the infrastructure to possibly make it happen. If I can Digg news, the logic goes, why anything in life, including these local businesses?
Back when I tried to get people to come in to local sites to review restaurants — using the best we had at the time, forum software — I remember the ad guys getting all hinky about bad reviews from the people. At one point, I suggested that the only real value was in recommending things so we provide the means for people to vote in favor of establishments. It was just a memo. Now here comes Digg, the recommendation engine.
Could newspapers and other local news organizations do this on their own> Or will Digg be the default infrastructure? Should newspapers and Digg consider working together? I don’t know yet. But we all know that capturing what the public knows about local businesses is a holy grail waiting to be uncovered.
Of course, this isn’t just about local. Could digging start to replace Consumer Reports? Don’t know again. Results there could be skewed by sample size (the more-often-used products will get voted on more often; a self-fulfilling result, perhaps); but put against the size of a product’s universe, it could be beneficial to see what proportion — rather than raw totals — of users vote up or down a product.
The Digg system is also best, so far, at currency: the army finds the latest. Will it work as well with more data-base-y pools of knowledge? I’m not sure. But you can bet that Digg will try.
On this week’s Diggnation, Kevin Rose — sitting on the bare floor of his apartment — explains to those who saw the cover billing on his Business Week proclaming that he had made $60 million:
I don’t have 60 million dollars. I don’t have any million dollars. I don’t have thousands of dollars…. I’m saving up for a couch.”
I had the scoop but couldn’t blab until now. But Jossip let the catty out of the bag, revealing the quiet launch of Lipstick.com as a Digg for the glamorous celebrity set instead of unglamorous geeks from Conde Nast.
First 10 headlines on Lipstick right now:
1. Brangelina’s sweet, sweet revenge on the tabloids (nypost.com)
2. Jen & Vince hang out in Sydney, acting more like friends than a couple (people.aol.com)
3. Lindsay, Scarlett, Jessica, Alicia Keys do serious couture at the 2006 CFDA Awards (style.com)
4. Is This For Real?! First Photo of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt! (dlisted.blogspot.com)
5. Brandon Davis’ grandma is a dirty liar (thesuperficial.com)
6. Aniston sees irony in her “Break-Up” role (montereyherald.com)
7. Lindsay Lohan Dating Everyone but Brandon Davis (jossip.com)
8. Keanu Reeves opens up: “I’m trying not to be alone so much, And man, it’s a struggle. I want to get married.” 9. Casey Affleck, Summer Phoenix Wed (people.aol.com)
10. A Diamond Binky For Shiloh Nouvel (shoppingblog.com)
First 10 headlines on Digg right now:
1. Dvorak: Our Modern World—Weirder by the Minute
2. Intel Core 2 Duo Blows Away AMD Athlon FX
3. AllofMp3.com Breaks Silence
4. Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router
5. Scientists resolve 60-year-old plutonium questions
6. It’s Hard Out Here For A Gamer
7. Cell-Phone Tracking Parents
8. 6Bone IPv6 Network Shutting Down
9. 24 Hours to stop new copyright law
10. RFID Gains Momentum In Pharmaceuticals
Hmmmmm. Worlds collide. Geeks v. glam. Rose v. Newhouse. This’ll be fun.
I recently trained the faculty of the journalism school where I teach how to blog, vlog, podcast, wiki, and Digg. Actually, my son demonstrated Digg, and that was the most controversial moment of the day, as the professors fretted about second-rate stories getting on the front page. Jake showed them how the members can label a story “lame” and off it goes. He made it clear that Digg is owned by its public and that’s why it works. Shouldn’t all news organisations wish the public owned the news?
