The 52nd most popular website online today is called Digg.com, a website founded in 2004 that brings in 40,315,228 unique visitors web browsers from around the world every month. It is a website that essentially serves as an aggregator for the rest of the world wide web, pointing daily users towards worthy posts, videos, essays, photos, or whatever else springs out of the minds of bloggers, youtubers, or online news media that can be linked. Digg creates a “best of” the web everyday and is so effective in directing users towards these corners of the Internet that it forms what has been coined as the “Digg Effect”: when so many Digg users go to the web site being linked that they crash it altogether. Needless to say, Digg has some cultural capital, it is in one way or another responsible for that funny video that got posted on your wall or what news item you are talking about around your proverbial water cooler. Even the “Ron Paul Revolution” can find its origins located in the cache of Digg’s web history, and while that revolution has all but failed, it is still extremely rare that one website online can mobilize a shit load of people to action, often offline.

Can you digg it? Well to co-opt (not plagiarize) the words of Barack Obama: “Yes You Can”. In fact, Digg.com is a web site founded on the principle of user involvement, a shiny poster boy/site for the oft talked about democratic revolution of Web 2.0. The eventual trendsetters who are scouring the vastness of the Internet enough to know what to post on Digg are none other than everyday people. The women and men (well mostly men) of cubicle culture, high schools, college dorms, public libraries, or any place with a broadband connection, are the ones that create the fresh daily content of Digg. A user, any user, can submit a link to another website and fellow Digg viewers will look at that link and vote for it, or in the world of Digg, they will “Digg it!”. Submissions that are more “Dugg” will be presented more prominently on the websites main page, creating a best of (or most Dugg) for the day.

A story on the top page of Digg is often craved by a web site, giving them instant traffic via the “Digg Effect” that will make that website more money based on ad revenues and give them a crop of new visitors that may continue to visit. Many websites have started to post an instant ability to Digg on their own websites. For example, many news features or blog posts do not end with a gripping last line, but instead the phrase “Digg It!” that links to Digg.

Founder and chief executive of Digg.com Jay Adelson stated in a recent interview of the instant internet power he has bestowed upon the people: “Users are increasingly participating in the kind of digital democracy the internet enables. New concepts, such as the social graph, social networking, citizen journalism and participatory media, have emerged that enable people to connect and interact online in entirely new and interesting ways.”

To an extent his statement is true. Barring Digg’s no pornography rule, the website creates one of the purest, most uncensored manifestations of “democracy” available to people today. Digg uniquely offers the ability to vote on ideas where everyone’s voice matters and you see it mattering, and that is ultimately part of its allure. While Adelson created a website that has people doing all the work for him, as he gets all the revenues, the sheer popularity of Digg (again, 52nd most popular out of approximately 29.7 billion web sites) shows that those people appreciate the work they are doing and the outcome it produces.

As for that outcome, well, that is one of the possibly not so great effects of Digg. The current top ten stories on Digg at the time of this writing features a picture of a guy with a hat shape carved into his afro, a link to a blog that has viewers guess what crime people committed based on their mugshots, a photoset with an orange who’s wife cheats on him with a banana, and a video of Obama singing the National Anthem.   These examples are hardly what one would expect from “new and interesting” ways to use the Internet and connect, as Adelson put it, but then again no one said democracy would be coherent.
Digg it?