Digg’s getting gamed… what we really need to do is learn to question, and learn to trust

Personally, perhaps it’s just how my brain is wired up, but I connected the dots between “Digg popular = traffic”, “lots of friends = lots of diggs” pretty much right away. But is it worth the backlash doing it so blatantly? I know kids with 1000 friends on MySpace, how easy would it be for them to do?

Source: The Secret Group-Digging Conspiracy | Performancing.com Chris Garret Aug 18 2006

I think Chris Garret has hit the nail on the head with what can be oh so wrong with the latest system of organising web stories with social ranking. It always seems to come back to the issue of trust. Trust ratings and other systems are always open to manipulation but in the end I guess you just gotta trust somebody.

Can ’social ranking’ be useful? Is it already too greatly effected by viral marketing?

I was just looking at some headlines on the Wordpress site somewhere and I noticed this article about Digg. I have only just heard about the Digg site from talking geek with someone at work a few weeks ago. He told me about this site maintained by Kevin who used to host this darkside segment on the now defunct Techtv Cable TV channel.

I used to watch Techtv way back when I lived in Canada. It had a lot of new about the computer world and most regulars on the show are still around now doing blogs and podcasts etc.

Hmmm… just thinking I should start a glossary section for any new terms I introduce on this infoman blog of mine. It could be helpful for people who are not familar with some the geek nomenclature.

Getting back to the subject of the digg article originally seen on Par!x ‘Digg Assigned to an Ecommerce Class.’ (17 August 2006) had been written about this girl trying to get an article ranked highly on digg for a class assignment. The comment thread itself seemed to have several off topic posts that were viral marketing or spam. Are we ready for the meta meta meta web. How can these socially ranked sites provide quality information when people are clearly trying to manipulate them?

Anyway real tired but thought I had better put a first post on this site before retiring.

Over and out