Digg just added social networking to its position as the leading player in submit-and-vote news! Yes, Digg added the second component of networked news to the first.
I’m not sure enough many people will have enough friends to end up caring so much more about what they think about the news than what the universe of diggers thinks about the news. I, for one, as a twenty-something workaday guy, just don’t know enough people who use Digg to slurp up their news efficiently.
But maybe there are fifteen-year-olds who use Digg to get all their news. And maybe there are enough who have lots of other friends who use Digg similarly. If so, the submit-and-vote version of the first component of networked news could be on its way.
Many people, including me, don’t use Digg because its content—often dominated, they say, by upper-middle class geeky white dudes—just doesn’t cut it. I’ll stick with hours upon hours in front of google reader, backed up by aideRSS, of course. But with networks of friends, like-minded intellectuals, no doubt, Digg could really scratch my itch for content on the impending collapse of the dollar or Barack Obama’s position on chatting with foreign leaders or this conference I want to go to badly. (They say there’s so little room! They say Dave Winer may show!)
Anyhow, when are we going to be able to digg stories from outside digg.com? When am I going to install on my facebook profile a digg application, in which I can choose to see everyone’s diggs, just my friends’ diggs, just diggs of certain topics, just my diggs going back through history, etc.? When, indeed, am I going to be able to vote from facebook? Stick an ad in your widget and be done with it, Mr. Rose, who’s a near-hero of mine, for his lack of technical skills, mostly. (He paid a guy—someone else, someone who could code—ten bucks an hour to develop the site.)
PS. Mr. Cohn, toss me an invitation to the conference you and Mr. Jarvis are doing God’s, or at least the Republic’s, work to organize! And ask the top diggers whether they think, or under what conditions, they think their role could shrink because people like me would shift our attention away from the Digg homepage to our own friend-centered niches by way of Digg’s bringing on the second component of networked news!
Josh
I will certainly ask them that question.
As for the conference – I’m working on it right now, but as I said before, things are really packed. Believe me – we want everyone to be able to come, but in the end we are limited by space – something that the internet still can’t get around when planning a face-to-face meeting.
We will be in touch.