Akkam’s Razor

There’s a little success story on the web by the name of Digg which illustrates as clearly as humanly possible the benefits of using "The Wisdom of Crowds" to create and mediate your content as opposed to a handful of editors.  By "digging" news items individually, the collective aggregation is FAR better than the selected handfull of stories that a half-dozen editors would select and promote as the days daily news.  Furthermore, a story "gets legs" and develops in response to it’s presence on the list, widening in scope, going greater into context, and drilling down into particulars, all at the same time.

Businessweek profiled digg founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, who stated that their inspiration came from an interview Rose conducted with the founder (Rob Malda) of Slashdot, venerable geek news source, while at the now "Comcastic" (ie. it now sucks, as G4) TechTV.  Rose’s observation was that Malda might receive several hundred submissions which were culled by the editors.  Rose thought that there was "gold" in some of those stories that might miss the attention of the editors, so why not let the readers/submitters promote stories based on their on merit.

You might be tempted to say that this is just a different way to do the same thing, but when it comes to freshness, loyalty, and growth rate, examine this chart from Alexa comparing the two:

As far as examples into the quality of coverage of a story - examine the "diggs" regarding the Sony DRM rootkit scandal… via digg.com/topstories/thisweek/:

• Rootkit discovered
• List of affected CDs
• Sony’s ridiculous spin on the story
• Police called in to investigate
• Microsoft ‘concerned’ by Sony rootkit
• State of California to sue Sony
• Virus found in the wild infecting via Sony rootkit
• Macs also affected by Rootkit 

Digg has earned it place on the internet by doing what so few entities, especially in this case, Sony, have failed to do - admit that your customer is smart, deserves your respect, and knows what he’s doing.