Background

We may take it as an incontrovertible truth that the Internet has radically transformed the way individuals and groups of individuals create, distribute, and use information resources. In fact, after less than 15 years of widespread use of Internet resources, the aforementioned statement seems quaint and understated -- like saying that the invention of the automobile changed a few things. This simple fact-of-life aside, it is perhaps more useful for us as information professionals to engage the heavy-lifting work of evaluating how effective commonly used Internet resources are at helping users acquire knowledge and suggesting ways in which these resources might be improved from an epistemological perspective.

Much has been said and discussed in this course (IRLS 617 Social Epistemology) about the ubiquitous Wikipedia and its paradigm-shifting impact on how we look at the the creation and use of information -- particularly in a digital world. Wikipedia, as a mass collaboration encyclopedia, has revolutionized the way individuals seek and use information, and, as we might expect, has also raised some serious epistemological concerns about the information it presents. A recent article from the journal Nature published findings of an in-house study that determined that Wikipedia is relatively accurate in comparison to the print gold-standard of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Encyclopedia Brittanica publicly called into question their methods and refuted the journal's claims. Wikipedia gains its strength from the same logic that has advanced the open source software movement to become a formidable opponent to the two yet-unchallenged corporate leaders -- that a critical mass of users trumps (or at least rivals)
the accuracy and efficiency of similar resources created by more monolithic entities.

Had it reached the level of its current popularity at the time Paul Duguid wrote "Limits of Self-Organization...," Digg might have been a useful target for the application of his "laws of quality." While not necessarily a traditional collection of resources, Digg's mash-up of social networking and digital information sharing and aggregation presents a ripe subject for the study of memetics. With millions of users taking part in the Digg experiment, it puts Duguid's first law to the test -- namely that the number of people involved gives an indication of the potential quality of the resource.

And it is with that "wisdom of the crowds" logic in mind that we stumbled upon Digg.com as a complex information resource driven by mass collaboration. Digg is modestly self-defined as a "a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web." A less understated description might mention that Digg represents a conglomeration of social networking, information discovery, and global journalism in one site that maintains a stable position in the top 25 visited sites in the United States and the top 100 visited sites in the world. We will have more to say regarding how exactly Digg works to popularize and share information (see "How Digg Works"), but for now it is enough to know that Digg empowers members of its community (over 1 million strong) to "digg" items they find on the Internet and popularize them through a critical mass of "diggs."

In a sense, Digg may be seen as the world's largest mass collaboration online newspaper, but we would like to extend the role of community members from simply being editors to being ad-hoc information scientists as well. Each member of Digg is engaged in selecting, evaluating, and cataloging online information resources to aid the discovery of those resources for future users. As a project engaging "scientists" in collaborative knowledge building and sharing, therefore, we think it appropriate to adopt Paul Thagard's nuanced version of epistemological assessment (1997). Thagard, unsatisfied with Alvin Goldman's focus on the verity of information resources in his epistemological appraisal standards, stated that scientists would
be reticent to identify their findings as "truths," since most of science is a continuous cycle of observation, discovery, and challenge. Rather than focusing on the "truth" of findings, Thagard proposes an epistemological appraisal of results. According to Thagard (1997), results "can include both empirical results consisting of experimental or observational findings, as well as theoretical results that consist of the development of theories that explain the empirical results. The criteria for counting something as a result are less stringent and metaphysical than those for counting something as a truth; as a first approximation, we can count an empirical or theoretical claim as a result if it is acceptable by a scientist's peers."

With this caveat in mind, we aim to apply a qualified appraisal of Goldman's epistemological standards to Digg with a focus on the results of the work Digg and its community members are doing. Again, Thagard's reframing of Goldman's appraisal is illustrative:

1. The reliability of a practice is measured by the ratio of results to total number of results and errors fostered by the practice;
2. The power of a practice is measured by its ability to help cognizers find the answers to the questions that interest them;
3. The fecundity of a practice is its ability to lead to large numbers of results for many practitioners;
4. The speed of a practice is how quickly it leads to results;

Before beginning our appraisal of Digg, however, it is useful to spend some time becoming familiar with Digg -- how and why it works, and — at times — does not work so well.

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.

Assessment: Speed

According to Alvin Goldman and his epistemic criteria, the speed of a practice is how quickly it leads to true answers (Thagard, 1997). The Internet provides the user a quick way to access information online. The speed of Digg.com is aided by the Internet and fast connections to the network. Thanks to the Internet and the ever-increasing connection speeds, people can now access information with lightning speed.

Goldman and Thagard are not alone in their "need for speed." Revered librarian Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan also saw the value of speed when searching for information. Ranganathan's 5 laws of library science cite speed as a very important consideration. Law 4 is "save the time of the reader." According to Ranganthan, saving the time of the user means providing efficient, thorough access to materials.

Virtually any practice on the Internet could be said to be speedy when compared to its manual counterpart. It is certainly faster to "google" a topic online than to look up that same topic in a series of books and encyclopedias in a library. But the user still needs to determine the truth of such information, whether that information is found online or in books. In our analysis of Digg.com, we do not claim that all information on the site is truthful. Yet true answers can be found using Digg.com. Information seekers should seek to determine the validity of the information provided for themselves. As with any research, it is helpful to identify the source of the information and apply some sort of evaluative criteria to determine the reliability. It may also be helpful to consult more than one source when researching a topic.

That being said, Digg.com still meets the criteria for speed in an epistemic evaluation. Digg.com serves as a speedy way to access information. The information is organized into categories and can be easily located using the search feature. It takes only a matter of seconds to display answers to a query. The sources of the information are available for further investigation.

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.

Assessment: Fecundity

In his article on Internet Epistemology, Thagard uses Alvin Goldman's criteria to assess the contributions that the Internet has made to the acquiring of knowledge. He defines fecundity by the capacity it has to lead to large numbers of true beliefs or results for numerous participants (cf. Thagard, 1997). Digg.com has the potential to meet this standard. Like the Internet and the World Wide Web that allow its existence, Digg can give people the answers that they seek in a way that is almost immediately accessible, even for those who are not affluent (Thagard, 1997).

Digg is a cooperative identification and evaluation website that uses many types of technologies to meet the goals of its users. It spreads knowledge through social interaction, though it is often indirect. By sharing discovered facts, Diggers are exhibiting a prominent feature of human civilization that makes the diffusion of information and, ultimately, knowledge easy, fast and less expensive or time consuming than the independent discovery of that knowledge. The dissemination of true information has even more veritistic value if it is new information (Goldman, 1999). Knowledge sharing through social interaction is an inherently fecund practice. More people can profit from more information because it is communicated.

When Digg began in December of 2004 as a personal project of the 29-year-old Kevin Rose, its major emphases were on technology, science and gaming; and its major medium was news articles. Techies loved its "[h]ardcore articles about how to make the Roomba robotic vacuum Roomba into a serial interface . . . and secret poetry for hackers in Apple's OS X 10.4.4" (Bulik, 2006). The second item was on the site's front page because the 80,000 registered diggers voted it there. Within a two-year span, Digg added world and business, sports and entertainment to its category choices. Digg widened its capability and Diggers expanded their contributions to include blogs, videos, and podcasts. Soon the site had a "platform from which to rank and share all content"(Bulik, 2006). Because of its willingness to branch out and meet its users epistemological wants and needs (it constantly adds and updates elements that make it more user-friendly and interesting), Digg is constantly attracting new members (not to mention casual viewers). By March of 2006, the site had an average 800,000 visitors per day (Arrington, 2006). Now it has millions of users ("Digg: More Content Changes Coming," 2007).

Digg has a number of features that allow people to tailor the ways that they gain knowledge through the site, and the growth in the community reflects this (Arrington, 2006). We will discuss a few of them (going into too much detail is beyond the scope of this assignment). In additon to the informational blogs, videos and podcasts that the members add to the site, the Digg site produces Diggnation, a podcast on the week's most popular stories, hosted by the founders. The most recent podcast as of November 18, 2007, "Beware of Herpes" discussed a number of topics, including the "Xbox 360 in Japan, Rabbit avoids death, Star Wars in one pic, Downloadable Xbox games, Circuit City scandal, Peter Griffin lives!, [and] Blu-Ray DRM cracked" (Diggnation, November 16, 2007). Although they tend to lean more toward technology, these podcasts can be varied in their subject matter. They are very informal, often funny and always informational. They are successful at informing Digg users about topics of interest to them and, through their comment section they can be a means of debate and shared knowledge.

Digg's search function has undergone a number of metamorphoses since the site's inception, so that it continually becomes more and more epistemologically sound. It quickly leads legions of people to the information that they need. In September of 2005, RSS was incorporated into Digg search. It enables Diggers to "create cusom live feeds based on [their] search criteria ("Digg search now with RSS"). In January of the next year, because of user requests, Digg lifted restrictions on searching burried stories and added the ability to find stories by unique URL ("New Digg Features Launched Today").

One of the most engaging epistemological features of the site, and one that impacts fecundity a great deal, is Digg's use of comment windows. It is here that the conversation about the articles really takes off, and personally, it has been helpful in decision-making (especially about technology) even when there was not the time to read the original articles. Most recently, Digg added helpful updates to the comment system that included having the ability to set how many threads are viewable at one time. This limits the time Diggers spend trolling the posts, and allows them more options for comparing submitted comments. As far as fecundity is concerned, it allows more access to more information (and, of course, speed is an element here, too). Digg also allows child threads to be viewed in the comments section even when the user has burried the parent comment. It is also possible to rate and rank comments (Stump, 2007). This allows even more access to yet more information for even more people.

Some of The Official Digg Tools are the result of wonderfully epistemologically fecund concepts. With these, Digg news can be posted on anyone's website, thus allowing more people the access to that information. One can also integrate Digging into a site, which encourages more stories to reach the front page--so that it is read by more people ("Official Digg Tools," n.d.). Other Official Digg Tools are Digg Arc (the newest tool) that exhibits stories, topics and containers connected in a sphere. Digg BigSpy puts dugg stories at the top of the screen. As new stories are dugg, older ones move down toward the bottom of the screen. Digg Stack (the Power section has an example) shows the diggs taking place as they happen. Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as diggers choose them. Diggers can then "swarm around stories and make them grow." Digg Spy v2 is an "autorefreshing realtime view of Digg now with spying [for] all stories, front page stories and queued stories" ("Amazing Digg Tools Collection"). Again, these are not all of the tools Digg offers, but even with the descriptions of the elements in this small sample it is easy to see just how limitless the possibilities are for making people aware of the information available, and so, giving them access to it.

In spite of all of the positive things that Digg contributes to epistemological fecundity, Digg has had to struggle (almost constantly) with limits in this area, whether by the inadequacies of the site itself or the deliberate actions of some Digg users. One possible problem for Digg is that none of the content is technically original--of course, epistemologically, this could lead to the site giving access to information that is more likely reliable. However, it can also lead to less opportunity for knowledge sharing. The site also does not allow editing of the material submitted. Descriptions can only be altered for up to 10 minutes after they are initially submitted, so that if a submitter realizes a mistake it cannot be easily or obviously corrected. Comments can only be editted for up to two minutes after they are posted.

As was stated above, Digg does not produce content that has not been seen elsewhere, but it does have a mutually helpful relationship with prominant news organizations. Top Diggers have the power to potentially to "drive a significant amount of Web traffic" back to those organizations (Cohn, 2007). On any given day, a story voted to Digg's front page can generate an extra ten- to fifteen thousand visitors for a site (Cohn, 2007). In itself, this is not a downfall; in fact, it only proves Digg to be a great supporter of fecundity. The concerns with this situation are two: 1) authors sometimes self-submit, gaining readers for their own stories--a possible breach of ethics; and 2) Other sites have offered large sums of money to top front-page contributers in order to get more of their information and product to the front page. This is against Digg policy, but it is difficult to police on a site that has so many users (Cohn, 2007). Digg has recently tried to combat these practices by altering the algorithm that establishes which contributions make the front page. The result is that it is now more difficult to get contributions to the front page ("Digg Friends," 2007). Web societies have emerged to try and manipulate the algorithm by inflating stories' votes (Cohn, 2007). These actions of some may cause others to experience a chilling effect. Why submit a story when it is possible the top stories are only in that position because votes have been erroneously attributed to them? A related action its creating fake accounts in order to promote a story to the front page. This is one of the many ways that people have tried to "game" Digg, though this becomes harder to do as the site grows (Arrington, 2006).

Another problematic trend for Digg has been the "bury brigade." Although Digg has continually taken steps to combat this, users seem to continually take steps to accomplish it as well, thus it is a fight that never ends. The "bury brigade" is a small number of diggers who "bury" stories "without accountability" (Johnson, 2007). Users of the site are given this option so that spam and imprecise or erroneous stories can be weeded out. There has long seemed to be a trend for people to bury stories that are completely accurate and the only conclusion is that they do not agree with the stories' content (Johnson, 2007). Burying of legitimate stories limits the fecundity of Digg because people will not have access to the information they need to formulate true beliefs or obtain ultimately useful results.

There have also been reports of Digg censoring stories that offend sponsors. There was a byline to this effect posted on Digg itself, but the actual story could not be accessed. The comments to this story were interesting. One stated that stories that are out-voted off the front page disappear from all search results and the history as well. Of course, this may all just be conjecture and venting by someone who was upset that a story they submitted did not stay on the front page. Other commenters accused the original poster of practicing "Yellow Journalism." Still, the possibility of it is troubling in a site that has so much potential to practice fecundity. (See the post).

Another way in which Digg may be fecundity-limited is voiced in complaints that the articles that make the front page are those that follow the party line. One blogger wrote:

People are sheep. People don't vote things up they disagree with, don't like or don't know anything about. So we see a kind of convergence. The stuff that to[w]s the community line, that most people agree with and that doesn't challenge people too much gets voted on, whilst the stuff on the fringes, the niche stuff, disappears. The . . . content becomes stale, repetitive and dull (Taylor, 2006).

If this is a prevalent occurrence then it is an epistemic concern for any user. The fecundity of a practice is limited by the all-too-dominant opinions of a group interested only in one line or object of thought.

These epistemological worries aside, Digg has the potential and ability to become a fecund powerhouse of information, especially as it continues to expand its user base more widely beyond American borders, and beyond the techy community that still tends to dominate it (Cohn 2007).

Assessment: Reliability

Reliability is one of the standards that Alvin Goldman has promoted to evaluate how well social procedures lead to true beliefs. He defined reliability as "the ratio of truths [or results] to the total number of beliefs fostered by the practice" (cf. Thagard, 1997). Goldman asserts "[r]eceivers have an option of believing, disbelieving, or assigning some intermediate level of belief to any message received" (1999). How then, can the givers of information make the information they give more creditable to the receiver(s)? One way is to ensure that the information being given is from a knowledgeable source. Another is to give assurance that the information being given is from an honest source. Normally, competence is proven by signals, like certification or proof of experience. Honesty is often conveyed by presentation style and a "prior pattern of (verifiable) truth telling" (Goldman, 1999). These are more difficult to demonstrate in a web-based community, where interaction is rarely long-term or face-to-face.

P.D. Magnus (2006) raised some of these concerns in his criticism of Wikipedia. He affirms that because there are volunteer editors continuously cleaning up poor grammar, bad spelling, and other physical signifiers of a resource's questionable reliability, it is more difficult to use these traditional signifiers to assess the reliability of a given resource (cf. Fallis). Content that is "dugg" by Digg users can vary from personal blogs to YouTube videos to corporate news sites, and (unlike Wikipedia) users can often rely on traditional signifiers to help determine the reliability of a resource. For example, let us assume a user comes to a blog article via Digg about the popular music artist Prince suing his fans over copyright infringement. If the article is riddled with conjecture, typos, or other signposts not typically found in a professionally written news piece, the user may choose to seek out other resources to confirm or debunk the validity of the claim. Indeed, thorough research practices should always involve seeking out supporting evidence, but it becomes even more critical if one doubts the validity of a particular claim.

Additionally, Digg, like many of its seemingly endless list of Web 2.0 sibling projects, provides a number of tools that can help researchers (whether casual or professional) avoid acquiring false beliefs. There are numerous opportunities for feedback and correction so that mistakes can be remedied quickly (Thagard, 1007). One aspect of Digg that dominates its features is that it is a socially based. Users of the site can learn, by experience, which posters tend to submit reliable content and comment.

Information gains and loses authority or reliability largely based on two questions: "Who said it?" and "Under whose auspices?" Researches have put their trust in these two questions for centuries (Ovadia, 2007). Authority, in the sense of library and information sciences, is defined as:

The knowledge and experience qualifying a person to write or speak as an expert on a given subject. In the academic community, authority is based on credentials, previously published works on the subject, institutional affiliation, awards, imprints, reviews, patterns of citations, etc. (Reitz, 53).

How then, can researchers decipher authority in the online world where reliability is often determined through popularity more than by traditional standards? The sociability of a site like Digg.com is one of the elements that gives it reliability. In 1968, J.M. Zinman stated:

Far from being the sum of independent, individual researchers, the continuous compilation of innumerable disconnected facts, observations and theories, scientific knowledge is the joint social product of the members of these 'Invisible Colleges' whose intercourse is through the citations that they award one another, however seldom they meet face to face (cf. Ovadia, 2007).

The same could presumably be said of non-scientific studies as well. It is the constant interchange of ideas that leads to the correction of mistakes and the production of new knowledge. Although some of the information Digg contains may not be completely reliable all of the time, it does have a characteristic that some web-based information sources lack, and that is that much of what is posted is not original material, but linked material. When a piece's title is clicked on, the researcher is taken to the original site of the piece's production. At this point, it is possible to do some background research to determine the reliability of the piece--the researcher can begin to understand who wrote it and what his or her credentials are. This can be carried out by a search of the author's name in an academic database or an engine like Yahoo! or Google. (Ovadia, 2007). A researcher can then know more about who the author is and why that author is qualified to speak on a subject.

In other words, like so many encyclopedic materials, Digg is a place to begin research. Some of the materials it contains might, indeed, be scholarship-worthy, but one piece of information can lead to another, and another--and each of these can solidify the authority of the one before. In doing this type of background searching, researchers can learn, not only to knowledgeably assess what they initially read in Digg, but also to "create their own authority concept" (Ovadia, 2007). In this way, it is content that is being judged as well as authors. Eventually, researchers learn to avoid that information which can lead them away from justified beliefs. Such research methods are the basic foundation for any beneficial information seeking, and only bolster the reliability of the items Digg houses as a whole. Like Wikipedia, Digg's reliability as an information service relies not on the the individual reliability of each item but on the aggregate objectives and execution of the service as a whole.

Conclusions

Digg.com has grown to become an ultimate and immediate cog in the wheel of Internet activity. Its amalgamation of social networking, digital information sharing, information discovery and aggregation has allowed and encouraged it to emerge as a powerhouse of information and, by extension, potential knowledge. The site has integrated the qualities of the web that make it possible for epistemological goals to be met by users worldwide. Its speed enables users to gain access to information so that their time is saved for actual reading, study and formation of new ideas. Time is not wasted on unfulfilled searches to the same extent that it once was. Digg also has characteristics that make it extremely powerful: "the wisdom of crowds" and tools that can make the researcher aware of things he or she might not have known they were interested in otherwise are joined by various search options and browsing possibilities. These, and similar, tools also make Digg.com a key instrument of fecundity. Users are able to tailor the way that they gain and share knowledge so that a greater number of people are given access to a greater amount of information, on a larger variety of topics. Finally, Digg.com has the potential to be a very reliable source. Though all of the items it contains may not be completely reliable, Digg makes it easy to trace the history of the item. In the end it is up to the user to determine whether the information he or she gathered leads to satisfying and justified answers, results or truths.

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