Digg.com is a geek paradise. The top story this morning asked “Remember Dungeons and Dragons 80’s cartoon?” I thought, “no. No I don’t.” But it’s been “dugg” over a thousand times. Somebody remembers. In fact, it’s a collection of somebodies, the same somebodies who helped populate the top 100 Digg.com stories of 2005. The results are fascinating—and telling.
Digg.com is a Web 2.0-style website where news items and articles are submitted by Digg.com users. Other uses give the article a thumbs up by “digging” it. The more users that digg it, the higher placement the story gets, following the “Wisdom of Crowds” philosophy to determine which stories are the most worthwhile.
The most dugg story was one illustrating the power of the weblog. It was a story about an abusive New York camera store manager abusing a blogger who threatened to write about his bad experience with the business. Subsequently, the tenth most dugg story is a follow-up blog entry detailing how the owner of the camera store apologized for the manager’s behavior.
Not necessarily tell-tale geek territory, even if it is sort of Revenge of the Nerds in nature (computer geek defeats bully). But the rest of the list gives it away—that is, in the classic sense of what it is to be a geek, not the modern world’s sense where squirrels kill dogs, pigs are flourescent green, and geeks are cool. Armageddon, anyone?
The top 100 dugg stories list is peppered with Photoshop tutorials, hacker vengeance, physics games, Steve Ballmer wig-flipping, and browser news. And nobody got dugg more by Digg.com users than Digg.com itself as articles about the social news site made its own list six times. Digg.com just loves talking about Digg.com.
But if Dungeons and Dragons, hacking, self-aggrandizement and really hard math-based sciences weren’t enough to convince someone that this was a pure geek domain, then wait until they get a load of this one:
The fortieth most dugg story of 2005 on Digg.com was the mathematically averaged digital image of every Playboy Centerfold from 1988-1997.
Case closed. The whole place smells of canned air.