Digg This

There is an news/article sharing site called Digg, that's been growing for several years. Evidently, their growth has become a challenge. The site relies on feedback from users to assign ratings to articles, so that the proverbial cream rises to the top. As more and more people contribute articles, the number of articles becomes unmanageable for users to sort through and rate.

The new approach Digg will employ to address this challenge is the introduction of a recommendation system. Recommendation systems take what they know about a user, and customize the output to that user based on what it knows. In the case of Digg, it will only recommend articles contributed or approved by other users that have a history of compatibility with you. So if you like many of the same articles as John Smith, the system will provide you a short list of articles that John Smith likes, rather than the 15,000 new articles received that day.

MIT's Technology review scooped this story, and published under the heading "Digging a Smarter Crowd". Now, I'm all for recognizing patterns of similar interests and customizing accordingly. And farbeit from me to challenge an MIT source. Still I take issue with the reference to the Wisdom of Crowds in this context. Having a rating system like eBay, Sermo, kluster, or other social based platforms is definitely harnessing collective intelligence. But we also know that part of creating a Wise Crowd is having a diverse crowd. If this engine groups like opinions, then where's the diversity?

I'd argue that Digg is a cool service that has a good way to produce customized results, but isn't producing results that are truly the product of a "Smarter Crowd". They are the product of a "Similar Crowd".