A Review of Digg: Model for Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking sites use tagging and pinging. Digg is a bookmarking cum blog cum technology news site. Why bother reviewing it? Because this site is an excellent model of user generated content, and has already started a ripple effect across the web. As its readers grow, it could very well become the next port of call for website promoters and advertisers.


The "Digg effect" is real, and worth watching as more user generated sites proliferate. If you already know all this, stick around anyway to get the dirt on Digg's problems and how they plan to get sold off for at least a hundred million dollars.

The first big social bookmarking site was del.icio.us. Yahoo jumped on it in order to get into "social search," which they hoped would be the wave of the future. "Social search" is simply a more primitive form of the PageRank algorithm that Google uses. After del.icio.us became big, a host of other bookmarking sites started slowly becoming relevant, among them www.furl.com, www.simpy.com, and www.digg.com. I started off writing an article about social book marking sites as a precursor to how user generated content would become even more important over time, and I ended up falling for controversial, innovative and highly usable Digg.

This article will briefly look at how you can use Digg to tag URLs so as to give other "diggers" an opportunity to vote, add comments to other digs, bury digs and give reports so that the news stays fair by cleaning up spam. Then we will examine illustrations of the "Digg Effect" and how it has the possibility of affecting the way websites are promoted online. We will also look at how top Digg users follow Pareto's Principle, and how a small group of users are basically running the show.

We will then check out some cool features Digg has, such as Digg Stack and Digg Swarm (you should see it to believe it, the images don't do it justice). Then some critiques will follow, such as how Digg's web site is rapidly turning despotic with their buddy system and blacklisting methods.

Digg was launched in December of 2004 by Kevin Rose Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson, with Rose claiming to be sorely influenced by www.slashdot.org. In 2006 Digg surpassed Slashdot in rankings and broke into Alexa's top hundred sites ranking. Add that to $2.8 million in venture capital money from Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network, and Marc Andreessen, and John Heilmann calling Kevin Rose the next "Negreponte," and you have a site that may change social book marking the way Google changed search.