The wisdom of crowds? Not so much
BusinessWeek blogger Rob Hof stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest in the social-media sphere with a recent post about what he sees as the drawbacks of a site like Digg, and how he has dumped it and gone back to Techmeme — a site that aggregates and ranks blog posts on various tech topics. Like many Digg critics, Rob’s main point seems to be that the posts are lame.
Rob mentions how others have come to the same conclusion, including venture capitalist Jeff Nolan. Former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble has unsubscribed from Digg because he says there is just too much crap. With my usual flair for the coinage of new terms, I like to call this the “too much crap” problem, or TMC for short.
There’s no question that the signal-to-noise ratio, as engineers like to call it, is sometimes frustratingly low at Digg and other aggregators. But is Techmeme.com that much better? It uses an algorithm that founder Gabe Rivera continually tweaks to sort and rank the different posts, but it also uses a “wisdom of crowds” approach, in that bloggers themselves are the ones who decide — by linking — which blog posts get pushed to the top.
Techmeme has its share of critics, however (including Jeremy Zawodny), who argue that it is a blogosphere echo chamber, with the same small group of blogs always at the top (solution: quit linking to them so much). So while Digg is criticized for being too inane and full of crap, Techmeme gets slammed for not being inclusive enough. When Digg does do some of what might you might call “editing,” (as Muhammad Saleem describes here), it gets criticized for not being the voice of the people.
Sounds like two ends of the same spectrum to me. Too much moderation or not enough? Too open, so that any moron can link (or bury) something, or too closed and restrictive? I think we are still looking for the right model. Digg, meanwhile, is also getting criticized for using misleading traffic stats. And my friend and former journalist — now at the b5media blog network — Mark Evans has some thoughts about Digg and the future of social media.
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(On Nov 27th, 2006 at 1:28 pm)
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