ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Digg.com has jumped the shark, it was fun while it lasted, and sure you can still get a lot of traffic from it, but it seems like a social software play that fails to leverage it’s crowd to do anything other than point at things like the village idiot. It did not require a lot of research to come to this conclusion, and anyone that wants to know about my methodology can ask me in the comments, or email me.

I rest my case, this was submited to digg two days ago and got one digg, when it’s probably one of the best bits of content that’s been published to the web in a while and certainly more important than the “dross of the moment” hat tip

So here’s the screenshot from the top stories on the “World & Business” section of digg:

My two main beefs with digg is:

1. Sensationalist news is not always the most relevant or important, I have local network news for sensationalist claptrap, and yet that is consistently what is promoted to the front page. It’s more a “viral news” tracker that actual news
2. Digg’s categorization of news items, or Information Architecture if you like, has always seemed woefully inadequate for the amount of information that was “passing through”

IMHO digg needs to get smarter in how it co-creates value with the community, and start really leveraging the crowds editorial and organizational skills, as opposed to the crowds ability to point. The fact that after it’s amazing growth initially it decided to go with an incredibly limited categorization hierarchy seems incredibly short sighted, and not very scalable. What about “tags” guys, what about a folksonomy, what about “tag clusters”, what about a co-created information architecture (see Peter Merholtz and Atomiqs articles on this). I’m sure that the limitation around categories and topics was one of the main drivers behind the digg clone phenomenon (over 250 digg like applications not counting social bookmarks), seriously, if digg handled categorization better there would not be the demand for digg clones. Even Steve at Micropersuasion pointed to another one today related to advertising called adveracio.us.

I guess what i’m arguing for is a rich multi-dimentional digg as opposed to the single dimension of popularity digg (I guess you could argue it’s two dimensions of popularity & category). Take for example this story about transparency in journalism from the Columbia Journalism Review, it was categorized under “politics”, and contains information about journalism, blogging, the media, jeff jarvis etc.

I don’t know, maybe it’s self-referential sensationalism can continue to generate a huge viewership, but surely the digg clones are a reaction to digg’s limited information space and bizarre categorization, but to me digg seems like one long episode of “cops” interspersed with brilliant excerpts from Robot Chicken.

from blaugh cartoons

BTW i’m not the first to accuse the digg system of mostly highlighting sensationalist claptrap, Richard MacManus wrote about it over at read/write web in February ‘06 On Sensationalism and New Media