Fresh Creation Inspiration for Creative Minds

• 30 Jan 2006
• 10:08 am

The Digg Experiment

As you may have noticed, Fresh Creation had some technical problems. The reason? An experiment that I’d like to call ‘The Digg Experiment’.

In an article about Web 2.0 I saw a list of websites which were referred to as examples of ‘the new internet’. In this list a website called Digg.com was also mentioned. Since I had seen this name pop up several times in articles before I decided to pay it a visit and put it to the test. A test which caused more than 11.000 Diggers to visit my website within 3 hours. A test that made my webserver tremble. And a test which made me think about journalism and media in the future.

What is Digg?

Here’s a quote from the faq-section of Digg: “Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With Digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.”

So basically what Digg does is create an environment in which EVERYBODY is a journalist, an editor and a reader. The ultimate democracy in journalism. It’s an exhilarating and scary thought at the same time. Exhilarating cause it gives you an instant chance of being a headline reporter (Andy Warhol’s “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” comes to mind now) but also scary cause what happens if the whole world is in charge of the news? Will the news about a spreading virus in Africa get more votes than the marriage between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie? Will an environmental disaster in Russia get more votes than a streaking girl during a footballmatch? My fear is that in both cases the last option wins. In order to check if my fear is grounded I decide to put this democracy in journalism to the test.

Sex, entertainment and technology

I surf to [url=http://www.digg.com]http://www.digg.com[/url], register and add some information to my Digg profile. The goal of The Digg Experiment is to make it to the frontpage with a newsfact that is mostly about entertainment/sex. The story also has to have a technological element since this is one of the requirements of being allowed to submit a story on Digg.

I decide to submit a story about a company which made a girl undress in the shopping-window of its store in Copenhagen. After shopping-hours. There is even a short movie available of the girl undressing and the people gathering to get a glimpse of her. Entertainment and sex in one message. Great! The technology-element is the fact that the girl is only a projection on a see-through screen. Sex, check. Entertainment, check. Technology, check.

Digg Spy

To test how Digg works I first submit a story about a BikeDispenser, a very clever new invention for cheap transport, and add it to the category ‘Design’. As I expected the story doesn’t get a lot of votes (only eight as I’m writing this) but it does make me aware of a very interesting tool on Digg: Digg Spy.

Digg Spy shows the voting-process in real-time. Every time a visitor ‘diggs’ a story that vote pops up in the Digg Spy overview. Besides an overview of all stories there is also an option for spying on the votes for stories on the front page or on the votes for queued stories. Really cool. So the thing for me to do is getting enough votes while being in the queuing area to make the big jump to the front page of Digg.

The Digg Experiment starts

Everything is clear now. Here we go. I click on ‘Submit a new story’ and add the url of the story on Fresh Creation. By linking to my own website I am able to measure the amount of visitors that The Digg Experiment will generate.

I have to enter a title, a description and the category of the story that I’m going to submit. A catchy title draws more attention so I write down ‘Girl undresses in 3D’. The description is equally catchy: “In a fashionstore in Kopenhagen a girl was changing clothes. After shoppinghours. She attracted crowds but turned out only to be a 3D projection. Watch the video.” Short, clear and tempting. As for the category I decide to choose ‘Technology’ since it seems the most appropriate.

Well, that’s it…. I confirm my submitted story and immediately go to Digg Spy to see what happens. The Digg Experiment has officially started.

They’re digging it!

At Digg Spy I immediately see how other Diggers start voting for my story. This is exciting! In no-time there are already 8 people out there who liked it. Since Digg Spy works real-time I don’t have to refresh the website to see the votes come in. I can just sit back and watch things happen.

The votes keep coming in. Every time ‘Girl undresses in 3D’ pops up on the screen I cheer. This is fun. The first comments about my story are added on Digg. People saying that Kopenhagen is with a C and not with a K (my mistake but in Holland we write Kopenhagen). Also people complaining about the fact that the title links to a weblog instead of to the movie. But the amount of complaints is very small when you compare it to the amount of people voting for my story. Almost 40 votes already. I check the statistics of my website and I see that every single minute about 10 Diggers drop by to check out the 3D girl.

My story keeps getting more and more Diggs. The amount of visitors to my website is growing faster and faster too now. I stopped cheering for each time that ‘Girl undresses in 3D’ was dugg cause by now every couple of seconds it pops up.

And then…. Little more than one hour after submitting the story The Digg Experiment already reaches its goal.

Yesssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!

Unbelievable. My story is now on the frontpage of Digg. The Digg Experiment has succeeded! I make a few screenshots so I have proof of this memorable moment. I check the statistics of my website again and the amount of visitors it gets is mindblowing. Every second (!!) about 5 visitors. Sometimes more. That’s 300 visitors per minute. 18000 per hour! At the same time I see in the comments that the video is practically unavailable now. The amount of votes for my story is nearly 500. The number one story on the list of top stories has little more than 800 votes and has been submitted more than 9 hours ago. Mine was submitted little more than 2 hours ago. So… Here comes Digg’s new top story number one!

Website crashes

The amount of visitors on my website is staggering. More than 11.000. Already more than 780 people voted for ‘Girl undresses in 3D’. But then it happens…. My website CRASHES. Three hours after submitting the story my website crashes.

Not because it couldn’t handle the traffic but because the diskspace on the server was exceeded. Sounds like a simple problem to fix, right? Simply throw away some files on the server that you’re not using and off we go again. But unfortunately I couldn’t even access the server because of the overload. And on top of that my hosting company didn’t have a helpdesk that you could call in the weekend. So… There was nothing left to do then wait till Monday.

What does The Digg Experiment prove?

Nothing. This experiment proves nothing. But it does give an indication of what might happen if journalism all over the world is controlled by everybody. The fact that ‘Girl undresses in 3D’ can become the number one top story on a website which is referred to as an example of future media models, scares me. Yes, seeing my story rise and rise in the Digg-charts was a big thrill for me. And yes, the huge amount of website-visitors was exciting. But when I think about the effect that this democracy in journalism and media will have on the quality and contents of the news then a different outcome would’ve pleased me more.

Related: Google and Amazon form Googlezon

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