Scrolling democracy at Digg

MIT's Technology Review provides its take on Digg, the intelligent browsing service where registered users bookmark the news and rate the news bookmarked by others. The result is an egalitarian community of readers who praise or pan the day's headlines with their choices. Now non-registered users can get a peek at the action as it happens.

Digg has unveiled some radical improvements to Digg Spy, a page that shows a scrolling list of the stories people are digging (and dissing) in real time. When you go to Digg Spy, you are essentially watching democracy in action. You'll see the new pages just submitted to Digg, the pages people have just dugg or commented upon, and also the pages they've "buried" or removed from the queue due to irrelevance or duplication.

Digg Spy provides the raw intelligence for swarm intelligence or emergent behavior -- a high-level property of complex systems. A global search of Digg using the terms "Emergent" or "Swarm" woudn't provide much evidence, though, that participants are terribly impressed with their themselves.

The MIT article also includes a link to "Dynamics of Digg," which goes into a little more detail on the community and its participants.

Wayne

Technorati tag: Digg

Comments

[Abuse Substance]

Thanks for a nice post such as this.