What´s cool and what´s not cool about Digg

One of the coolest Digg.com features is the non duplicate control on submissions. The way it works is that Digg check submissions against already submitted content and sees if yours is significantly similar to anything that is already up. If it is, Digg will show you what that content is, letting you decide whether to post it or not. From that point on, Digg could put you on a watch list and match the submission (I have submission way too much, haven´t I?) against spam complains to “burry” the story or delete your account.

Duplicate content is all around us, including at Google. News search for example often return several links from different sources with the same news just because all of them are more popular (PageRank and all other criteria they might use) then the next news.  Digg solution to duplicate content makes it way more easy to read and digest.

What I don´t like about Digg is that It focuses on popularity rather than on quality of content and hence it is subject to gaming.

What Digg and Google have in common is that they are both content aggregators and those are not doing a great job at dealing with information overload.

Content needs a curator. Mahalo is a man powered army of curators focusing on various niches. Wikipedia is non profit venture on the same vein. Delicious is a curator of content sources but not of content. The question is whether content can be curated in both a decentralized as well as for profit way.