Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Digg needs a section for blogs


Digg is, of course, the popular news site - stories chosen by the masses ad promoted by the masses. The site has been lauded and hated alike, and Diggers are vocal participants in the phenomena known as Web 2.0. Digg is the most democratic of news aggregators, and Keven Rose and company have been covered by periodicals such as Time and The New York Times. The most important news is daily brought to the front page by the people who matter the most: The users.

But increasingly, Digg's democracy has discovered entropy: Bugs in the system, glitches in reality. Occasionally, Digg doesn't work the way it's supposed to. More and more, people are submitting stories about blog entries - Gasp! The horror! Digg is being invaded by blogs!

Seriously, many blogs don't constitute news. The problem with the Digg website is that there's no section for blogs: News blogs have to go in the Political Opinion section, and Linux blogs have to go in the Linux section - even though neither are categorically newsworthy. Then there are the rumor blogs - you know, the ones that say, "G.W.Bush executed Saddam Hussein so Hussein couldn't testify to Bush's plot to take revenge for his father," or, "The Linux kernel was written by Steve Wozniak, not Linus Torvalds!"

The Digg team has recently introduced new categories to the website: Podcasts and Videos. Wouldn't it make sense to then add a Blogs section, as well? Many blogs simply aren't about news, as the News category might suggest. Separate the wheat from the chaff, and everyone will be happy; the blogosphere won't bother the news junkies, and vice versa. The Blogs section could even mirror the News section and all its categories, to satisfy the news blog junkies.

This would eliminate complaints about the presences of blogs on the front page of the News section. The new Videos section has worked very well thus far: There have been virtually no videos submitted to the News section since, and everyone is satisfied. Why can't the same be done for blogs?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No doubt inspired by this: http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Digg_dilemma_submit_yourself_or_leave_it_to_others

I had exactly the same thought!

Patrick White said...

Actually, I wrote the blog entry starting around 1 PM or so. I dugg the story, but only after it became popular at around 1 AM at night. It's really just a coincidence. If I had written the essay after I read the Digg story, I probably would have linked to it to emphasize my point.