I used to think this was an interesting idea until I looked at Digg, Mixx, Reddit, and Newsvine, and saw a lot of dog stories, a story about a bimbo, and an octopus escaping through a one inch hole. Not a lot of useful information. It's kind of like getting your information only from the Onion. I would far rather trust my local newspaper editors to decide the most important stories of the day than 10,000 random people with too much spare time.
What's more, important stories get ignored because few people "digg" them. A large company can skew the results of a product release by providing thousands of college students a free cup of Starbucks to "Digg" their product. It makes me think of the difference between a representative democracy and direct democracy. We live in a representative democracy for the most part, and we elect representatives to make informed decisions about laws. California indulges in direct democracy and ruined one of the best school systems in the country by passing Proposition 13. I'm glad Minnesota has not yet partaken of this experiment.
I suppose our library could use this type of social software to provide students the ability to "digg" items in our catalog. However, we might get better results if faculty were the "diggers". Otherwise, the only items that rose to the top would be the same items with large circulation numbers: UFOs, witchcraft, deformed humans, cults, marijuana, etc.
I joined Digg a while ago when a friend asked me to Digg something that was important to him. So I suppose I'm part of the problem. What information can you trust these days? While it's certainly interesting and entertaining to see what other people find interesting, I don't know that it's particularly useful.
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