Digg
Digg
URL = http://www.digg.com/
Description
Kevin Rose explains the workings of Digg at http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2007/07/kevin_rose_extended.html?:
"MJ: To those who've never heard of Digg, can you explain what it is?
KR: Digg is like your newspaper, but rather than a handful of editors determining what's on the front page, the masses do. Which, I've got to tell you, takes a lot of getting used to. There was a good six months there when I was freaking out because I didn't know what type of content the collaborative filter would produce. Fortunately, it's been solid, really cool, interesting news.
MJ: How does the filter work?
KR: Basically, any user who creates an account is an editor of the site. Right now we have a little over 1.2 million registered users who find interesting news and videos and podcasts. And when you find content you like—it could be a New York Times article or a blog entry or a video—you submit its URL to Digg, write a headline, choose the category that it belongs to, and it goes into our "Upcoming Stories" area, where thousands of users sift through it. If you find something there you like, you Digg it. Once enough people have Dugg the article, it goes to the front page, where 2.5 million daily viewers see it.
MJ: So, to the novice, it's sort of like a crowd-driven Google News, but with more diverse content?
KR: Absolutely, except rather than spiders crawling the news sites for stories, or automated feeds, someone has to physically submit a story to Digg. One of the things that's been crazy for us has been the speed at which news can break on Digg, because it's powered by a mass of humans versus a machine that has to go out and crawl and find the information and then determine its relevance mathematically." (http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2007/07/kevin_rose_extended.html?)