Digg will serve as a means of gathering metrics for third party websites, providing them insights into who's digging their content, who they are spreading it to.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Digg is like your newspaper, but rather than a handful of editors determining what's on the front page, the masses do.
We want to open digg up to just about anyone and everyone that wants to express their interest in any type of news story or Web content.
One of the things that's been crazy for us has been the speed at which news can break on Digg, because it's powered by a mass of humans versus a machine that has to go out and crawl and find the information and then determine its relevance mathematically.
At our peak, no one knew how to value Digg.
With Digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
The web has introduced a competitive, and some might argue hostile, landscape for long, in-depth, resource-intensive journalism.
The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage. It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don't have access to politicians, who don't have easy access to official documents, who aren't able to buttonhole people in power.
At Yahoo, we were one of the early proponents of the power of content showcased through new media. SnagFilms, with its large library and breadth of digital distribution, can help shape this next phase, bringing great stories to broad new audiences.
It's quite complicated and sounds circular, but we've worked out a way of calculate a Web site's importance.
Since news breaks on digg very quickly, we face the same issues as newspapers which print a retraction for a story that was misreported. The difference with digg is that equal play can be given to both sides of a story, whereas with a newspaper, a retraction or correction is usually buried.