Digg Reverse Engineers Attention Owners

cant smoke like kate
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Digg recently raised a few $mill in quality VC, and alexa analysis has shown a head to head battle for users/traffic with (their quite different peer) slashdot (as we know alexa is dodgey on many fronts and has heavy IE skew) The Digg boys crack open new beers on their weekly Diggnation podcast, which while lacking the X-Factor does well promoting the most digg'd stories, and is almost entertaining banter. 2006 Jason Calacanis predictions include they will be bought by CNet - Alex Bosworth article is interesting saying the digg algorithm is farely basic (users "digg" a story) but the "ecosystem" around how a story is dug is more complex, harder to control, but a major quality driver. What digg is doing is definitely a piece of the puzzle, and a current midpoint between opensource forums/slashdot and yahoo/google news. Mr Alex Bosworth : "The main function of digging is really used by those who patrol the link queue. People who probably have run out of interesting things to read, are looking for the newest of the new news, or want to help control the front page watch over the torrent of submitted links, looking for diamonds in the rough that belong on the front page. The interesting thing is that these people are served differently by digg than their upstream brethren, they use digg to look at a giant link queue and not just another news site. Without these people, digg would cease to function: nothing would make it out of the link queue." News @ 11