The Copenhagen Project

Digg is an interesting platform for a variety of reasons. In the perspective of this project it has some great features, but overall it’s not helping users in having an overall view of our complex world. Let’s look at Digg through our model.

Presentation

Digg’s way to present information to the user is determined by a collective voting system. What Digg presents as important to it’s readers is therefore not determined by a set of editorial values, but rather by the average sum of the user base’s values at the time given. The links that gets digged to the frontage share a common value to the community that can be summarized as ‘interestingness’.

As there is no overall editorial guidance, the front page of Digg and the subsections are continually running lists of interesting pieces of information presented with no relation to each other. There’s very little introduction to each link and it’s usually a short summary of the content. The summaries seems to be of relatively high quality on the front page. It’s probably rare that a link get’s digged if it has a bad or uninteresting description.

Context and perspectives

The context provided to links at Digg is user comments. It’s interesting that Digg uses it’s voting system to rate conversations: Comments found valuable by the community is digged to the top, bad and invaluable comments is digged down.

At June 18th Digg launched it’s new comment system, which seems to succeed very well in the hard task of structuring thousands of comments and still making it possible for the conversation to be meaningful.

I like Digg’s voting system in the comments a lot. Rather than read through all comments, it’s possible to have them sorted with the most digged first. The Digg-function seems to be a powerful way of organizing conversations and context, and will probably be something we’ll get back to later in the project.

Tools to create meaning and take action

As Digg is an editorial and discussion tool, users is only helped in their meaning creation by the conversations in the comments. The social aspect is important at Digg, and it’s enhanced by the possibility for the community itself to vote down trolls.

There’s not really any build-in function that supports or encourages people to take action upon provided information.

Conclusion

The Digg-model needs huge improvements to work as a general entry point for people to get an overall view of what’s happening in the world. Overall Digg seems to be more of an exploration tool.

The most interesting part about Digg is not how the community ‘edits’ the frontpage, but how discussions and comments gets structured. Digg’s commenting system is probably the most advanced out there, and it works really well. In relation to The Copenhagen Project it’s interesting how this concept can be used to facilitate better context and perspectives when combined with other tools.

IMHO of course.

Other ressources:

- Our Digg mind map

- Toward a Better Digg. A list of 10 services that uses Digg-like voting in different ways.