What’s Next for Digg?
July 18, 2008
by
Liz Colville
When it comes to online journalism, Digg is the poster child of Web 2.0. On Digg, the people make the editorial decisions about what floats and what sinks. The site is ad-supported, but remains privately owned and without the trappings of a social network. What’s the next move?
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In an interview with the Guardian this June, Digg founder Kevin Rose explained the essence of the site, which has garnered 3 million registered users since its launch in 2004. “People want to have a voice and a say in what is news. We’ve levelled the playing field by accepting all other forms of content, whether it’s sources from CNN, the Guardian ... it’s about seeing what the masses want to surface.”
Interviewer Zoe Margolis suggests the dual function of Digg: browse its homepage for the most popular content of the day, or participate by submitting the sites you think should be viewed. What Rose now wants to add to Digg is a social networking component. Harnessing information on what others are reading, Rose hopes to better link users to each other’s “dugg” articles of choice and create a social network of the site’s millions of users. Digg users whose minds think alike, he reasons, should get to know each other.
Source: The Guardian
Whether Digg makes money or not will have to do with the success of its advertising platforms. But Digg is itself working as an advertising platform for other sites. The blog ReadWriteWeb noted in late 2007 that “Getting to the front page of Digg leads to such a traffic surge that it has been known to cripple web servers.” There is a complex science behind Digg popularity; it can be as complicated and as challenging to make money from them as from Google AdWords and AdSense, two highly popular text ad services. Even velocity is a factor in Digg popularity—“The faster diggs come, the more likely for the story to pop to the front page.” This bit of science reflects how quickly something buzz-worthy can be lost in the thick of other developments.
ReadWriteWeb calls Digg a “scientific experiment in human-induced self-organization.” In pondering what’s next for the site, RWW acknowledges that there really is no other site poised to compete with Digg, which takes away the kind of rivalry that Facebook and MySpace are entrenched in. But its traffic isn’t rising substantially, so the “future will depend on who acquires the site.”
Source: ReadWriteWeb
Fun With Digg
Digg Labs is a site that lets users explore what’s happening on Digg in real time. How do the biggest stories get big? What are some of the popularity trends making headway on Digg? Graphs and simulators help illuminate all this on the futuristic Digg Labs site.
Source: Digg Labs
Diggnation, the highly popular weekly videocast that Digg’s two executives run from a sofa, pits PC against Mac in a review of the week’s top stories on the Digg homepage. Kevin Rose sports a MacBook Pro, and Alex Albrecht¸ a comedian and seasoned Web video host, has a shiny red Dell. Most of the videos feature the guys bantering, peppered with some footage of the stories and multimedia they spotlight. Making the site’s exec the reliable co-star of the show has helped reinforce the idea of the multi-millionaire CEO who is “just like us,” whose ideas are in sync with what we want to do and see on the Web, and who doesn’t hide behind auto-reply e-mail accounts.
Source: Diggnation
Besides viral marketing—the sheer power of having hundreds of sites with Digg buttons next to their articles and millions of users promoting the site—Digg is using Diggnation as a PR event. The two hosts recently held one of their weekly shows in New York, where some two thousand fans showed up to drink beer, watch the hosts drink beer, and review the wacky and crucial news stories and videos of the week. Blogger Jeff Jarvis, attending the event, wrote of Digg, “What’s notable to me, more than its size, is the passion and loyalty of its audience…Could you imagine 2,000 fans standing in the rain for the chance to watch your local anchorman or hear your local editor?”
Source: BuzzMachine
© 2008 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
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