There are one too many puns I can play on the name of Digg. I won’t bother…
While visiting GDC (for the non-gaming crowd that would be “Game Developers’ Conference”) in San Francisco, I managed to stop by Digg offices for a chat with the founder of the company Kevin Rose. We hit on a number of points in our conversation, both Digg and non-Digg, like the phenomena of Digg All-Stars, podcasting, online videos and….
A more interesting part of the interview had to do with a strong and well-thought out analysis Jaron Lanier put out recently in Edge about the “Web 2.0 community space.”
To sum up, he makes the observation that a hive mentality, a “digital mob,” takes control in many Web 2.0 sites (Wikipedia, Digg, Reddit). He argues that the danger with an online collective like this is that a certain crowd dictates tastes, which may result in trivial stories dominating the news front page. He makes parallels with other hive mind mentalities of a Fascist and Maoist bent, and even coins the term “Digital Maoism.”
The article and the video interview are both available here: (Be sure to digg it!)
If you’re into web “something.0″ or even cyber culture, it’s well worth it.
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