CATEGORIES
- NYC COVERAGE
- WEB STARTUPS
- WEB NEWS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB TECH JOBS
- VENTURE CAPITAL
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- ADVERTISING
- VIDEO
- ALL TOPICS
- ALL COMPANIES
CONTRIBUTORS
- ADRIAN CHAN
- ALICIA NAVARRO
- ALLEN STERN
- CORSIN CAMICHEL
- DRAMA 2.0
- DARREN HERMAN
- HANK WILLIAMS
- MARK DAVIS
- RICK TUROCZY
- SANFORD DICKERT
- SHANNON CLARK
- Comment on YouTube Down by DVS01
- Comment on Twitter COO Costolo: Advertising Coming To Twitter Soon by Satoshi Nakajima
- Comment on Twitter COO Costolo: Advertising Coming To Twitter Soon by OMG Stop the Web! Twitter is gonna run ads ? and Scoble says you?ll love it
- Comment on What?s Up With Yahoo Mail Delivery? by MJ
Sorry Mike, Digg is NOT a User-Generated Content Site
Last Friday was the Crunchy awards – we ran color commentary all evening via the streaming feed and only once did the feed die for everyone — that point was when the winner of the "best user-generated content (UGC)" site was revealed. As soon as the winner received their award and moved off-stage, the feed came back. Everyone in the chat was scrambling to figure out who won, eventually it was revealed that Digg was the winner.
The chat room went off on the selection simply because Digg is not a user-generated content site. Digg is a great service from two perspectives: it helps you find good, fresh content to check out, and from the publisher perspective it can send a massive amount of traffic when a story hits the frontpage. No one knows the latter better than Crunchy founder Michael Arrington and his blog Techcrunch which is the third most dugg blog of all time (only behind Ars Technica and Engadget).
With Digg, you find a good piece of content, and then submit a link to that story on Digg. That’s it. The Digg submitter submits 250 characters to describe the story but 97.85% of the time, the submitter is pulling the description from your story.
Examples of user-generated content: Wikipedia, your blog, Flickr, maybe even Twitter. Other examples of non-user generated sites: Delicious and Reddit.
I would classify Digg as a UGC aggregator. Pulls in the best content from around the web, helps people find it, and sends them out to that content. Another classification could be content directory – Digg creates a directory of some of the best content from around the Web into verticals.
This isn’t anything against Digg, just attempting to properly classify the service for next year’s Crunchies. In what category do you classify Digg? Do you agree with me or Mike and his winner selection committee? (it’s ok if you agree with them!)
Dig is 100% a UGC site. All my search engine searches seem to bring up digg as a number 1 or 2 spot. background check
It’s all semantics. I mean, I still don’t quite understand the point of an “awards” show for businesses but it’s their awards show, so they can do what they want.
That said, looking at this in a more literal sense of the word, it may still apply – it just depends on what you look at as being as the “content”. Clearly, the articles being linked to are not generated by Digg users during their use of the site, but the ATTENTION data is. And, ultimately, it’s the attention – the “filtering” – that becomes most valuable in sites like this.
So, again, semantics, but there’s certainly a case to include them in such category.
Seriously. Screw Digg. Come to Mixx.com instead. They have cake there.
I have long pointed out that creating and filtering content are different activities. User Filtered Content is in fact one of the best ways of understanding how Web 2.0 works. For more detail and frameworks see:
http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2008/01/user_filtered_c_1.html
Anonymous is right about D. D arouses a lot of user hostility for their practice of political censorship. Reddit has more annoying content, uncensored, true grass roots, not astroturf. D is an aggregator, clearly. The fact that the users play a role in determining the content which is aggregated is significant to the role of D. Other sites, such as Reddit, give users much more control over the selection of the content which is aggregated, and have a better claim to being UGC. But another factor is the comment section. Reddit has a very active community of commentators, while D is largely a couch-potato operation. I would definitely consider Reddit to be UGC on the basis of the commentary dialog content, while that would not be significant in evaluating D relative to UGC.
You’re saying that digg users do just as much work as people on flickr? Isn’t that just a little bit absurd? I can find a story to post on digg, and then post it, within a few minutes and without leaving my seat. Finding a good subject, making sure the light is correct, and getting the right angle, shutter speed, and f-stop all take a hell of a lot longer.
Frankly, that comment is insulting and ignorant.
I don’t have a problem with you calling digg UGC, but give us a break.
Digg is made up of user-submitted links. Without users, the Digg homepage would be empty. Digg doesn’t go out on its own and get links to stories. Digg users build the front page. The Digg front page IS the content.
While I agree that Digg can be considered an aggregator or a directory… without users Digg wouldn’t be anything. I’m looking at the homepage of Digg right now… and every links is provided by users. Digg isn’t a robot search engine… Digg users make Digg what it is.
The titles, descriptions and comments are all created by Digg users and released under a Creative Commons Public Domain License. Everything you see on Digg, other than the site framework, was created by a Digg user.
“A collection of links that people vote on is UGC? I am absolutely not sure how to reply to that statement.”
Certainly. As I said before (right above Erick’s comment), there is attention data generated by users of Digg which is where most of Digg’s value comes out. As subsequent comments here have pointed out, without that use Digg would be indistinguishable from a set of links.
I also wouldn’t qualify a blog or the underlying links as “user generated” content. One definition of “user generated content” is content which “that is produced by the user as opposed to by a publisher”. The mere fact that someone can “self-publish” on a blog doesn’t make a him a third-party user.
Unfortunately, UGC aggregator was not a category :). And that would not be entirely accurate, anyway, since Digg aggregates professionally-generated content (like stories from Wired) as well as user-generated content.
The real question is what is the content on Digg? It is a collection of links placed in order of importance. The people who determine that order are the users. Hence, it is user-generated content.
You could argue that the users don’t actually do much work, or at least as much work as users on sites like Flickr or Wikipedia. But then, I’d argue right back that is what makes it so successful—a low barrier to participation.
Erick Schonfeld
Co-Editor, TechCrunch
Thanks for stopping by Erick. Are you suggesting that you aren’t sure if Digg is UGC? If that’s the case, why was it part of the category at Crunchies? :)
UGC isn’t about doing work at a level – it’s about the creation of the work.
"The real question is what is the content on Digg? It is a collection of links placed in order of importance. The people who determine that order are the users. Hence, it is user-generated content."
A collection of links that people vote on is UGC? I am absolutely not sure how to reply to that statement.
I agree with Erick on this one. Does Digg content exist without users? Sure it’s easy to create the content (just link to another site), but it is the users of Digg that are generating that link.
I agree with Erick, that digg can be considered UGC. While subject matter that digg links to is not created by digg users, the selection, classification, and sorting of the links is done by the community. The organization of these links is in fact digg’s “content”, and this “content” is user-generated.
yes digg should count as UGC site. would digg exist without the users generating the content on digg? sure they don’t create the original content but how many of the people on wiki created what they’re writing about or people on flickr create what the’re photographing? if anything they’re all one in the same except digg’s content is links whereas wiki’s is events and flickr’s is peoples photos of places and things. what i’m trying to say is most are just regurgitating content already in existence, your just being picky about what you consider good UGC, take the users out of any of those sites and they don’t exist plain and simple.
You’re implying Digg’s content is that of the page it links to, which is wrong. Although the linked page’s content is really what I am interested in, the actual content Digg supplies is only the link itself (and comments) which is user submitted. So through a technicality, Digg is indeed UGC (and awesome).
User generated mean mostly that your users (accounts) are the one that are filling the site. Remove the users, the site is down. Blogs are not UGC, the public blog sites are. A real UGC blog would let anyone signed in write his own blog entry. So in fact your site is not a UGC. Since you are the administrator and the content creator, you can’t be defined as a user.
Digg and flicker on the other site offer a framework and let users do whatever they want. Public blog sites use the same approach. You only need to register and then you can submit content. No matter where your content come from, it’s generated by you, a user. A personnaly owned blog is as UGC than a newspaper letting user comment the news. Difference being the newspaper pay his journalist, while personnal blog are paid with the adversisements/sponsors.
Digg SUXX!!!
Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!Digg SUXX!!!
I’d agree except for one thing – the comments – that’s technically ‘user-generated’ – things are shared within the comments as well. But again Digg is mostly an aggregation of user generated content and media endorsed content.
Actually, its both … you get content aggregated from other sites of interest, then peer reviewed with comments from Digg users …
UGC aggregator is the correct term for digg.
thanks for the correction head-ars :)
wonder what ars looks like sans digg.
Ars is #1, not Giz or Engadget :)
I think of Digg as an aggregator.
I’d agree except for one thing – the comments – that’s technically ‘user-generated’ – things are shared within the comments as well. But again Digg is mostly an aggregation of user generated content and media endorsed content.
I’d agree except for one thing – the comments – that’s technically ‘user-generated’ – things are shared within the comments as well. But again Digg is mostly an aggregation of user generated content and media endorsed content.
I’d agree except for one thing – the comments – that’s technically ‘user-generated’ – things are shared within the comments as well. But again Digg is mostly an aggregation of user generated content and media endorsed content.
Allen once again you hit the nail on the head. UGC aggregator is the correct term for digg. A bunch of competition would be generated for digg at the next crunchies, because it would not be considered UGC – as it is not.
Rex
AFAIK Digg sends a measurable amount of traffic to Ars, but the vast majority is still our ol’ pal Google
Yes, I agree. Digg is not a UGC. Perhaps for sites like this one we should invent another term, perhaps UAG (=User Aggregated Content) or CAbU (Content Aggregated by Users)
Why is it necessary to categorize everything into neat little buckets anyway?
It should be in the recommendation service category – much like yelp etc.
Instead of feeling good about lamb chops at their favorite restaurant (as in yelp), digg users recommend news they think is worth reading (or trashing).
Very accurate observation. I think the answer to your question is in the eye of the beholder.
One could say, that digg is a site, whose content is generated by users. True. Its content is actually only hyperlinks to other content. This content (the pure hyperlinks) is generated by users, who also vote its popularity.
An interesting question emerges: If you have a link-blog, are you the creator of its content or the targeted links?
Roland Barthes had written an article on this subject in 1967. The death of the author, it was called.
Dear Opinion, we are so like-minded it’s scary – I think your category title is great but you need to fit in “Narcissistic” somewhere. How about “Best Site Controlled by Angry, Narcissistic Geeks who WILL NEVER Get Laid”.
“some influence”
Search “Digg effect”
idiot
I think Digg would have been more appropriately placed in the “Best Site Controlled by Angry Geeks who Need to Get Laid” category.
Digg is not a user-generated content site. It serves two purposes:
1. It allows people who are too lazy to produce content to feel like they have some influence on the Internet by “voting” for the content they like. Usually they vote for content that only .01% of the Internet population would actually find interesting.
2. It allows content producers to leverage services like Subvert & Profit to obtain exposure for their content on the cheap.
On a side note, for what it’s worth, I thought Kevin Rose should have won for Most Likely to Run Out of Luck.
http://www.drama20show.com/2008/01/18/the-crunchies-ultimate-preview/
Yes, Digg isn’t an UGC site for sure. I feel its a web 2.0 enabler wherein the users who consume the media would tag/link it on to digg. The defining factors of web 2.0 such as contribute, share, discuss, comment,etc come into play which is followed by game theory. we don’t necessarily end up seeing best of content out there nor it necessarily aggregates all the content to be an aggregator. Allen, we need to coin a new category for these web 2.0 enablers.
I don’t think that digg fits the “user-generated” content category in the same way as a wikipedia or flickr. I think the content directory name, though not as sexy, is a better term.