Leave it to The Economist to tell this paleoreporter about the digg icon at the end of many online news stories. Previously I’ve hesitated to push digg because I ascribe to Cincinnati City Motto (as translated from the Latin) “Don’t Do Anything for the First Time That You Haven’t Done Before.”
Digg links users to an online community whose members decide what news reaches Page 1 of the digg.com web site. Each click is a “digg,” as in “I dig.” Dated, but cool.
Members submit stories, images and podcasts. Then, digg.com says, “Other people see it and digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see. We’re committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing.”
Digg.com elevates click whores to call girls or rent boys and it substitutes vox populi for an editor’s judgment of what the public wants and needs.
Leave it to The Economist to tell this paleoreporter about the digg icon at the end of many online news stories. Previously I’ve hesitated to push digg because I ascribe to Cincinnati City Motto (as translated from the Latin) “Don’t Do Anything for the First Time That You Haven’t Done Before.”
Digg links users to an online community whose members decide what news reaches Page 1 of the digg.com web site. Each click is a “digg,” as in “I dig.” Dated, but cool.
Members submit stories, images and podcasts. Then, digg.com says, “Other people see it and digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see. … We’re committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing.”
Digg.com elevates click whores to call girls or rent boys and it substitutes vox populi for an editor’s judgment of what the public wants and needs.
But it doesn’t end there. The Economist says digg.com has become the the mother lode of data that Hewlett Packard’s Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman are using to quantify ways of drawing eyeballs to an ever-changing electronic Page 1.
Their initial conclusions were published in a paper, “Popularity, Novelty and Attention.” It’s available online here. They suggest that the key is the tension between shortterm novelty and longer-term popularity (or durability/importance).
Novelty would be a “Lion nurses lamb” story. Successful novelty moves to digg.com’s front page quickly but interest dies fast, Wu/Huberman learned. Using this strategy to maximize clicks requires an endless search for and posting of novelties. Rise and fall are rapid, measured in seconds. It’s a short half-life, they say, drawing on nuclear science.
Popularity is harder to define, but it includes politics, war, home mortgages, etc. Popularity manifests itself far slower (in diggs) but has greater staying power on Page 1 as diggs accelerate and peak; its half-life is much longer.
Curmudgeon Notes
This article appears in May 7-13, 2008.
