How Digg works

Digg.com is an online news and information resource and social networking site. Digg is advancing social networking as a means to information sharing and discovery. The site supports a community of Internet users that find content to add to Digg. The site started in November of 2004 with an emphasis on science, technology, and gaming. The content was mostly news articles. It has evolved to become a social networking community that responds to the desires of its users. Digg.com now contains information about many topics: sports, entertainment, business and world news. The site has also branched off into new mediums such as blogs, videos, and podcasts, with original content.

Anyone can join Digg; there is no cost involved. It does require that users agree to a terms of use policy when signing up for an account. This includes agreeing to their privacy policy. But the Digg community is not limited to just those registered users. The Digg.com site is free for the public to use, and anyone can view the content, although they cannot vote, or "digg" a post unless they are logged in.

So how does it work?
The site actively encourages participation and there are no editors. The users determine the popularity of the content. Digg users provide links to web content and describe their post with a title. Other Digg users may comment, carry on discussions about the post, and vote positively or negatively about the post. This is done by clicking on the "digg it" button next to each post. If a user does not like the posted content, they can click on "bury it" to reduce the popularity of a post. Users can only vote one time per post. The more popular a post becomes, the better the chance that story will be on the front page of Digg.com and allow the whole world to see it.

How a story gets to the front page is a bit of a mystery. The algorithm used is secret, according to Digg.com:

The promotion and burying of stories is managed by an algorithm developed by Digg. There is no hard number of Diggs/buries to promote or remove a story. It's based on a sliding scale that takes several factors into consideration, such as number of Diggs, reports, time of day, topic submitted to, Digging/burying diversity, etc.

Digg also continues to release new features and add functionality to the site to improve the user experience and build community. Users can now track the activities of their friends and rate individual comments. Also recently added is a digg the candidates feature providing information on the political candidates in the U.S. presidential race, as well as the elections and primaries.

Social Epistemology of Digg
Digg is changing the way people consume and interact with information online by providing a place where people can "collectively determine the value of content." People are able to carry on online discussions about the topics that matter to them. Digg.com is a forum for information sharing and open discussion about anything imaginable. The community plays a large role in determining what will become front page news and what will be buried.

So how popular is Digg? People from all over the world use Digg for their online information needs. As the demographics show, it is currently more popular in the US than in any other country. The traffic for the site varies, but the popularity continues to increase.