OPEN

Time for a bit of cold water to be thrown on my ardour for the whole community-as-editor, wisdom-of-crowds thing about tech news aggregator Digg. I’ve become too infatuated with it for my own good.

Time, then, for a bit of perspective on the subject, as Lloyd Shepherd runs through the numbers on an excellent post called 50 users v 1 editor where he considers the "crowd" behind an editor’s decisions about what gets published as opposed to the votes from 50 "Diggers" it takes to get a story up on Digg.

As one of the digital publishing team at Guardian Unlimited, he’s bound to be biased towards editors, but he makes a very good case for not getting carried away with the Digg phenomenon.

He concludes:

My
instinct is that everything we do to “edit” the site seeks to keep a balance
between editorial instinct and the desires of the audience, and that, in doing
that, we may be reflecting the “community” more fairly, both mathematically and
ethically, than the likes of digg.

I remain incredibly enthusiastic about Digg’s approach. But I do think it’s useful to get some perspective and remind ourselves (or, ahem, our more devotional and geeky friends) that Digg’s not some kind of hive-mind or collective intelligence, nor does it necessarily have any particular wisdom as yet.

But it is a lot of fun, it is a radically new way of sorting news and I’m not sure that the small numbers involved in voting stories on to the site have any bearing on its potential as a model for aggregating / filtering news.

: : Fellow digital Guardianista Simon Dickson thinks that Digg will remain niche. Again,
my same comment applies – Digg may stay super-niche, but the editorial model is
transferrable and may have potential beyond geekdom.