Can Every Citizen Be an Editor? Digg Awarded

The winners of the first-ever Crunchies Awards were announced in Herbst Theater in San Francisco last Friday. The Awards were organized by popular blogging firms GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch to pay homage to the best websites in 19 categories including Best Technology Innovation, Best User-generated Content Site, Best Design, Best Business Model and etc. The winners were chosen by online votes ordinary Web users cast. The awards are 14-inch-tall plastic statues of a cap-wearing monkey poised to smash television sets and other electronic devices with a bone in a reference to a scene from the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

While Best Overall award went to Facebook for its revolutionized idea of what social networking could be and Best Mobile Start-up to Twitter, a citizen journalism site, Digg, grabbed the Best User-generated Content Site award. Do you remember the story of Ohmynews targeting Europe posted in this blog on 26 December last year? I mentioned in the post the news site’s new experiment, named Ohmynews E, of inviting citizens to the editing field under the motto of “Every Citizen Is an Editor”. Digg is exactly the site that realized the concept of citizen editors far earlier than Ohmynews.

Digg, created at the end of 2004 to discover and share content from anywhere on the web, is a name that originated from the English word ‘dig’. Digging the best stories from the sea of information, the Internet, is what the site is said to be up to. Everything on Digg from news, videos, images to podcasts is submitted by its users. Readers can evaluate each story and give it diggs, or points. Once a story has enough diggs, it appears on the front page of Digg. Otherwise, it will stay in the “digg all” area and eventually be removed. Digg has grown large enough for the past three years that “being dugged”, or appearing on Digg’s main page, often leads to a sudden increase of traffic to the website from which the dugged story originally came. Digg users refer to this change as a “Digg Effect”. The contents submitted to Digg used to be mainly technology and science articles. But the range has kept broadening to politics and entertainment.

Wikipedia is called a collective wisdom site and Wikitorial experiment such as that of LA Times may be referred to as collective reporting. The creation of Digg was based on the idea that if collective wisdom and collective reporting realize, why not collective editing. Its founders introduced the phrase of Collective Lens. The website maintains that by looking at information through the lens of the collective community, the users will always find something interesting and unique. This is the very idea that Ohmynews copied expecting a slightly different effect. The news site hoped that the collective lens could let users find something IMPORTANT as well as interesting and unique.

Digg’s success has been achieved amid criticisms centered on the site’s form of user-moderation. It is argued that Digg allows its users too much control over the contents that sensationalism and misinformation thrive. The site has been denounced for being too vulnerable to attempts to manipulate information, especially by companies willing to pay for favorable stories. If similar vulnerability were exposed in Ohmynews’s copycat service, the consequences would be more serious because Ohmynews citizen editors decide whether a story is worth reporting rather than interesting.