The Copenhagen Project

Digg and del.icio.us looks and feels somewhat alike and are definitely very different from e.g. The New York Times. Let’s try to compare them, looking at the front-page of each service respectively.

They do indeed have a lot in common, but also differ in at least three crucial points.

First, whereas Digg is very much build and staged as a place for conversation and debate, del.icio.us has no build-in conversation functionality. While Digg is a community with interaction, del.icio.us is much more a product of it’s fundamental staging as a personal tool, where conversation isn’t possible.

Secondly, whereas the basic idea of Digg is to actively engage people in a process of editing a front page, the basic idea of del.icio.us is to enable it’s users to easily file their bookmarks. The del.icio.us-front-page is therefore rather different from Digg - it’s users aren’t consciously thinking in terms of editing. While Digg’s front page is constantly influenced by voters, the del.icio.us front-page is a map of user activity at it’s primary service. This is reflected in the type of material found on the front pages; digg.com’s objects are often characterized by being “news-worthy”, whereas del.icio.us’s objects usually are less timely, and a great deal of the objects are reference material.

Thirdly, Digg utilizes human editors (the users), whereas del.icio.us uses an algorithm to decide the content of it’s front page. It seems to be a rather simple algorithm, but it’s there. It’s impossible to say how it’s tweaked though.

So there you have it: From a media perspective Digg and del.icio.us differs in the areas of social interaction (conversation/no conversation), in the type of editing (editors/voting) and which type of editor that edits (human/algorithm).