Summary: digg’s presentations of top news stories epitomizes the grass-roots “wisdom of the crowd” philosophy, and I discuss below why I think Jaron Lanier’s critical characterization of this as a “hive mind” is irrelevant. In addition to a straightforward summary of news stories, digg also has some stunning visual displays you should check out, known as digg swarm and digg stack. And digg illustrates a critical success factor for Web 2.0 companies: creating and nurturing a community of passionate users, who help develop the social infrastructure that ensures that the larger body of visitors and users behave themselves in a civilized way.

For those who have no idea what digg is, or what it does, here’s the short introduction: digg’s home page lists the title and brief summary of approximately 15 articles in each of seven categories: technology, science, world & business, sports, videos, entertainment, and gaming.What makes it different than, say, the CNN.com website or any of the other familiar news sites is that everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community — i.e., ordinary consumer/citizens, of whom digg has currently has approximately 500,000 registered on its site. After someone in the user community submits some content (which can be a conventional news article from some newspaper, or a blog posting, or a YouTube video, etc), other digg users read the submission and “digg” (i.e., vote for) what they like best. If the story receives enough diggs, it is automatically promoted to the front page for millions of (unregistered) digg visitors to see. So it’s the epitome of bottom-up, grass-roots, user-controlled news dissemination, as opposed to the traditional top-down, controlled news publishing business in which mainstream publishers, editors, and columnists determine what shows up on the front page of your daily newspaper, and which stories will be featured on the evening TV news program.

Since digg is located in downtown San Francisco, I thought it would be valuable to visit them and get an understanding of their technology, their strategy, their view of how they fit into the Web 2.0 world, and their thoughts about where all of this — and in particular, their contribution of user-driven news reporting — is likely to evolve in the next few years. Digg’s senior software engineer, Owen Byrne, very kindly spent an hour sharing his thoughts and opinions about all of this, and I found his insights and perspectives quite interesting and useful. But interestingly, we spent relatively little time discussing the deep philosophical debate about the “appropriateness” of digg-like news publications, and we spent no time at all discussing the recent debate about digg news-posters who have been lured to a competitive site at Netscape. I’ll spend a couple paragraphs explaining why I think both topics of debate are essentially irrelevant, and then return to Owen’s explanation of how things work at digg.

As for the philosophical question of whether we should depend on the “wisdom of the crowd” to select the top stories for our reading pleasure, or whether it’s better to have a largely invisible group of authoritative editors and publishers, I have a very simple response: the two alternatives need not be mutually exclusive, so each of us can pick the one with which we’re most comfortable. As I discussed in a recent blog posting, people like Jaron Lanier feel strongly that “the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?” He’s entitled to his opinion, and he’s entitled to get his news from The New York Times, or The New York Daily News, or whatever he feels is an appropriate alternative to the “hive mind.” But many of us don’t have enough time to read the New York Times (or whatever newspaper we consider authoritative) from cover to cover; we don’t have the time to watch Larry King or Charlie Rose (or whatever TV commentator we feel is authoritative) interviewing someone in depth. To a greater or lesser extent, most of us do rely on our grass-roots network of friends, family members, and business colleagues to help us filter the news that’s likely to be most appropriate for our needs. So my recommendation is: choose a top-down or bottom-up approach to suit your needs, but stop trashing the alternative choice.

As for the digg-Netscape controversy: it highlights the fact that of the 500,000 registered digg users who are allowed to submit an article for posting, most of the activity comes from a relatively small subset of roughly a thousand people (I don’t know the exact number, nor does it matter very much to me). It turns out that the same phenomenon exists for Wikipedia, too; and with almost any large community enterprise, it usually turns out that there is a small percentage of very active participants who do 80% of the work, and a much larger percentage of people who only do 20% of the work — because they’re too busy, too lazy, or simply less passionate about the activity itself.

So, is it a good thing or a bad thing that Netscape has lured away some number of the active digg contributors to help them build up a user-controlled news site? I think it’s too early to tell how much benefit, if any, Netscape will get from the tactic; but I doubt very much that it will have a serious impact on digg, because other contributors will move in to fill the void. I don’t have a strong opinion, one way or another, about the ethics of the strategy; it seems a little like poaching a bunch of employees from a competitor’s business, which happens all the time. But it has inspired raucous debate and commentary in the blogosphere, as you can quickly observe if you type the search term “digg Netscape” into Google; for example, here’s one blog posting titled “digg steals from Netscape stealing from digg.” Outside of the very tight-knit bunch of folks who inhabit this part of Silicon Valley, I think the general reaction is: who cares?

Well, enough about the philosophical debates. Aside from the technology and the organization of its website, digg is an important example of a common theme in the Web 2.0 world: unlike the flashy startups that gobbled up millions of dollars of venture capital money toward the end of the dot-com bubble, many current Web 2.0 companies got started in someone’s garage or kitchen, in a short amount of time, and little investment. Digg was the brainchild of Kevin Rose, and required only $3,500 and two months from the creation of the idea in October 2004 to its launch in December 2004. It catapulted into the big leagues in February 2005 when it published news about the theft of Paris Hilton’s Sidekick cell phone, and then grew at a rate of 20 percent per month. $50,000 of “angel” money helped fund a second version of the system in July 2005, and shortly thereafter, the venture capitalists began knocking on the door — leading to a $2.8 million VC investment in October 2005.

One of the things that’s interesting about all of the Web 2.0 products and services is the demographics: are they being used by high/school/college students, twenty-something professionals in the workforce, or an older generation of people in their thirties, forties, or fifties? Owen told me that at an earlier point in digg’s history, when it displayed only technology-related stories, 70% of its users were under the age of 27, and the number of users over the age of 40 was vanishingly small. Digg now carries stories on a much wider range of topics — including the full list of seven categories mentioned at the beginning of this article — so the demographics may have changed. Video is one of the most popular categories of stories these days, and that’s predominately a younger-generation area of interest; but the other popular category is politics, which could (at least in theory) attract middle-age users as well as younger ones.

As for technology: looking at the main digg website, my impression was that it doesn’t depend on a lot of razzle-dazzle technology. Owen says that, in fact, it does contain some complex Ajax code, but agreed that it’s not really “rocket science.” On the other hand, he says that there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes, back-end technology to combat spam and fraud — e.g., fraudulent attempts to boost the Digg rating of certain stories and blog posts, in order to gain more prominent placement for those stories.

But while the digg home page may seem rather plain and straightforward (not that that’s a bad thing — after all, nobody seems to care that the craigsList homepage is just simple, small-font text!), you can’t help being dazzled by the animated visual displays within the “digg labs” section of the site: digg stack and digg swarm. Digg stack reminds me of the old “bricks” video games from the 1970s, with rectangular “bricks” falling from the top of the screen to form piles whose height indicates the popularity of various categories of news stories. And digg swarm displays a series of bouncing “bubbles” that appear on the screen as new stories are posted, and which grow in size as their popularity increases, moment by moment. If I were a modern-age Shakespeare, perhaps I could find a poetic way to describe these two tools in a more vivid way; but it will save a lot of time and energy on everyone’s part if you just click on the stack link, or the swarm link, and see for yourself. Even if you normally don’t like to spend your time clicking on extraneous links in the middle of an article like this, trust me: these two are worth the time.

I do have to admit, though, that after watching the stack/swarm animated displays, I asked Owen what practical purpose they served. He shrugged and said that it could be regarded as a form of collaborative filtering. Well, yeah, but perhaps there’s another way to think of it: it represents a form of “non-intrusive” information display, something dubbed as “ambient devices” by some researchers and startup companies a few years ago. After September 11, 2001 and the introduction of color-coded terror alerts, for example, a Cambridge-based company called Ambient Devices sold a device about the size of a light bulb, known as an “Ambient Orb,” that plugged into any electrical outlet and and picked up a wireless signal to display the Homeland Security Department’s current terror alert status. When it became evident that this information rarely changed (and that nobody knew what they do with the information anyway), the company thought of a few other things to display: local traffic congestion, weather status, and the speed and intensity (volume) with which the stock market averages were going up or down. All of which sounded intriguing, and I bought one of the devices to sit quietly and unobtrusively on my desk; but after a couple months, I got bored with it. Meanwhile, the company still exists, and has a number of intriguing devices; check out their product page if you find any of this interesting.

I still believe that ambient devices are an important concept in our overcrowded world, particularly in the area of news broadcasts. It’s just too distracting trying to watch a news anchor on CNN while a text “crawl” slides along the bottom of the screen, displaying a cacophony of information ranging from trivial (how many fried shrimp did Jon Benet’s accused killer manage to eat on his flight from Bangkok to Los Angeles) to critical (how many people were killed yesterday in the Israel-Lebanon war?). So an unobtrusive digg swarm display of information might indeed be useful, if I could put it on a spare display monitor on the side of my desk; I could glance at it, from time to time, to see whether any of the news “bubbles” had grown to a sufficiently large size that I should click on it to see what’s going on. But for the moment, it’s just fun — or perhaps “eye candy” would be a more appropriate phrase. I don’t think anything is wrong with that; indeed, it might help attract attention to the site.

There’s one last aspect of digg that I think deserves emphasis, and it’s one that I’ve heard mentioned in every Web 2.0 company I’ve visited this week: the importance of a “community” that not only provides feedback and commentary to the vendor, but which also creates a set of protocols, behaviors, and etiquette that helps newcomers learn how to behave properly within the community. Wikipedia relies very heavily on such a community — i.e., its group of editors and moderators who help ensure that a “neutral point of view” (NPOV) is maintained for Wikipedia articles, and that arguments and debates about appropriate corrections and deletions of articles are handled courteously. And the same is true of digg, according to Owen: there are a few hundred people who not only contribute articles to the digg site itself, but who also maintain on their own blogs notes and articles about “how to be a good digger.” While all of this seems intuitively obvious to the community of Web 2.0 vendors here in Silicon Valley and various other parts of the world where I’ve met Web 2.0 startups, I suspect it’s something that many large-scale, Fortune 500 enterprise-Web-2.0 initiatives are likely to miss completely.

Well, digg is obviously off to a Cinderella beginning: founder Kevin Rose has become a Web 2.0 celebrity, and the site has attracted a large number of enthusiastic, loyal supporters. It remains to be seen whether the company can scale to become a Google or even a mini-Google, but I think they’ve already provided society with a valuable perspective on how many of us would prefer to have our news stories prioritized and presented to us. I look forward to seeing where they go from here.