Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

One website I look at virtually every day is Digg, a social news aggregator that allows members to recommend (or “dig”) content from all around the internet. Each day the Digg algorithm selects the top stories based on member recommendations and displays links to the articles on the homepage. Members can also comment on the recommended articles and oftentimes the comments are just as interesting as the content itself.

Digg started out as a site used mostly by internet ‘geeks’ and as such the top stories tend to reflect the tastes of the members (which is perhaps why I like it so much). It’s not uncommon to see articles on Apple, web design, and the latest XBox games make it to the front page, though as the user based becomes more diverse these types of articles are becoming less popular on the site. Still, Digg is dominated by a specific demographic that tends to recommend articles that are not necessarily ‘mainstream’ and those users continue to fight for their voices to be heard on the site.

The whole idea of a user-generated ‘news’ site is a great one but it still hasn’t really hit the mainstream like Facebook or even YouTube. Unlike Facebook or YouTube, where I argued niche version of the sites are counterproductive, a niche version of Digg could make sense for certain user groups. Take politics for instance: It’s safe to say the majority of Digg users are left-leaning and as such the top news on the site is chock full of articles sympathetic to the Democratic cause. But what if you’re a Republican? Where do you go to find the best articles on John McCain (other than Fox News )? You need like-minded members to help you find the articles that fit your interests and unfortunately, Digg is not the place. Digg is working on integrating social features to help solve this problem but it’s still a long way from working the way it should.

I suspect that some news sites like CNN.com are already employing ideas gleaned from Digg like using news item popularity to populate the home page. For instance, an article on Brittany Spears may start near the bottom of the page but after CNN editors see the story is receiving more views than ‘hard hitting’ news stories they may decide to ‘promote’ the article.

Is there a large demographic that’s being ignored by Digg that should have its own social news aggregator?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under Business, The Internets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.