Assessment: Power

In appraising the power of Digg, we are primarily concerned with how effective Digg is at helping users find results that answer questions that are of interest to them. Fallis (2007) points to the sheer number of participants adding and editing content on Wikipedia as one of the contributing factors to it being an epistemically powerful resource. With over 75,000 people contributing or editing content at a given time, Wikipedia is a powerful epistemic tool with which users may acquire knowledge in which they are interested.

Digg similarly benefits the same critical mass of users that afford it a tremendous amount of power as an information resource. With over one million "editors" (and "information scientists," for our purposes), Digg uses the "wisdom of crowds" to increase the popularity of resources. Increased popularity increases the visibility of a given resource, and it is then promoting it to the front page or to one of the top items in a given timeframe if it receives enough attention. Popular resources may include an individual's blog entry, a news article on a corporate newspaper's website, a video on YouTube -- essentially any electronic resource posted on the internet.

In addition to simply scanning the most popular resources, Digg users are also able to conduct keyword search on topics of interest or browse categories and sort entries according to their popularity, date, or medium (articles, podcasts, videos, etc...). Digg Labs (experimental projects in beta-testing; see links on menu to the right) also afford users a number of graphical interfaces with which they may interact with information and glean knowledge. For example, the Digg Labs project called "Stack" shows "diggs" dropping onto a horizontal plane and building up columns as more users digg an item. The title of the stories appears below on a cascading menu below the plane and under the column for which the digg correlates (see below)













Granted, these projects do not necessarily aid users in finding results that answer questions that are of interest to them, but they do present an interesting epistemic phenonenon. Perhaps one of the more unique aspects of Digg has to do with the site providing Digg users with knowledge they did not know they were interested in finding. Through filters on the site that allow users to browse the most recently "dugg" resources, the top resources "dugg" within the last 24 hours, or 7, 30, or 365 days, Digg encourages browsing through resources to discover information that the user may or may not have been seeking initially.

How do we apply an epistemological appraisal to providing knowledge users may not know they are interested in acquiring? While this may seem to make Digg even that much more powerful, we might consider such extraneous information as static that obscures a user's ability to acquire knowledge they are actually seeking. For example, suppose a user is interested in acquiring knowledge about the recent Writer's Guild of America strike. The user may choose to visit the "Entertainment" section of Digg (containing items cataloged as entertainment-related), and click on "Top in 24 hours" in that category. When we conducted this search, we found a number of resources including an article reporting on the first four days of the strike, another discussing the impact that the strike will have on the popular program Lost, and an article about NBC firing 102 staffers from the show The Office. Each of these resources may lend credence to the power of Digg, but the glut of "static" resources makes it epistemically useful to consider the "distraction factor" as a potential epistemic obstacle that is pervasive in online sources like Digg and Wikipedia.

We see the distraction factor as proportional to the epistemological speed and power of an online resource. In other words, the easier it is to acquire knowledge, the easier it is to become distracted from the original epistemic objective that directed the user to the resource to begin with. A simple search on lifehacker.com for "distraction," "attention deficit," or "concentration" provides a glimpse into precedence that users are placing on focusing their online work. And a recent interview with Dr. Edward Hallowell (CNET, 2007) identifies attention deficit traits as an acquired affliction derived from overstimulation and resulting in lower workplace productivity and personal achievement, in general.

We mentioned that users are able to discover resources via searching categories; however, user cataloging does not always lend weight to the resource's epistemic power. Digg, in all of its "non-hierarchical democratic editorial control" splendor has ultimately turned its users loose on the Internet to vett and popularize content -- a nod to the Duguid's second law of quality (that "good" resources will rise to the top while "bad" ones will be buried). A recent examination of Digg revealed the most popular recent item under the "World and Business" category was a link to an item called "Food Fight" — an adorable picture of a gopher tussling with some birds over some kibble. The number one article in the "Top 10 in World and Business" was a "dugg" item featuring a picture of a woman giving the finger under a table to a voyeuristic photographer attempting to steal a photo from a seemingly unwitting subject.

Imperfect classification of information and information overload notwithstanding, Digg provides access to acquiring knowledge users are interested in as well as access to knowledge acquisition in which users do not yet know they are yet interested. This information "push" and "pull" presents a unique means for us to assess the power of Digg.