Foundation of web 2.0 – Pattern One: Harnessing Collective Intelligence “Digg”

Harnessing the Collective Intelligence is about building value into your product, by harnessing the data that it contributed by your users as well as managing network effects that are associated with it. This is generally seen through active participants directly and indirectly made to a website. I’ve chosen Digg.com as a perfect example to showcase how a web 2.0 company is utilising their user base at enhancing the quality of their product the more people use it. For those that aren’t familiar with digg.com, they provide a social news site where users can submit stories from all over the internet for other users the “digg” them as well as comment on these stories. Once a story is regarded as a top story it is promoted to the front page of Digg.

According to compete.com, Digg in the month of August 2009 had just under 44 million unique hits. So what is the formula the digg’s success. Well as mention it is the freedom and trust Digg put on their users to decide on the content they want to see on the site. The core concept of the site is being active within the community, either through leaving comments on a story, digging a story that you like or submitting a story you find interesting. With the incorporation of Facebook connect Digg has minimised the barrier of adoption by allowing users to connect to Digg via a Facebook account. This has also opened up for services like Facebook and twitter to monitor activity on Digg and promote this through these social networking services.
Digg also takes the data posted very seriously and are constantly looking at ways to reduce gaming of the system as well as improving the overall accuracy of top stories through their promotion algorithms.

What Digg has done since its introduction in 2004 is provide a way for people to share information in a way that is very natural and in a way that the internet had not know for during traditional web 1.0 setups. Where Digg’s popularity today has stemmed from giant steps the company took when this type of news aggregation was not heard of. When a large organisation like CNN has developed their own style of user based new aggregation ireport.com, it has shown the success of Digg has had a profound impact on the way people are getting their news.