I’ve been hearing about DIGG for the last year or so. For example, when I spoke with a colleague about my FSEM project, she said, “that’s cool, but you didn’t use DIGG?” Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about Digg and “similar social bookmarking tools.” I don’t know enough about Digg to say whether they did it justice, but I think they missed the whole point of the long tail. The article seems to focus on how Digg and similar services identify and even create “what’s hot.”
I have used furl and now I’ve moved to del.icio.us. In my usage, I really don’t care what the most popular tags are. Rather, I use delicious as a sort of annotated bibliography to keep track of documents and websites that I’ve found and tagged, and to find out what others have found using the same tags. It’s not at all a competition of the sort described in the Journal article. Quite the contrary, it’s a collaboration.
Am I missing the point?
No. The “what’s hot” feature does add a game-like element, an element of play, but of course any good capitalist society knows how to turn games to profit (and along the way, kill the play).