I have to admit I don't think a lot about Digg.  I subscribe to the tech feed but the site itself has almost become a utility to me.  Like the phone or electric company it just isn't something I'm really conscious of anymore.

But the news that Google might acquire Digg really put the site back in the forefront of my mind and had me thinking back to when Digg was the hot topic in the blogoshpere.  Remembering back to that time I couldn't help but ask...

"What ever happened to all the Digg vs. Slashdot debates?"

For those who don't remember, Digg vs. Slashdot was the topic to discuss a couple years ago.  At the time Digg, the young upstart, was just about to overtake Slashdot on the traffic front.  Here's a quote from January 2006 (courtesy of kottke.org)...

There's been lots of talk on the web lately about Digg being the new Slashdot. Two months ago, a Digg reader noted that according to Alexa, Digg's traffic was catching up to that of Slashdot, even though Slashdot has been around for several years and Digg is just over a year old. The brash newcomer vs. the reigning champ, an intriguing matchup.

A Techcrunch article from the same period provides this Alexa chart (Digg is the blue line). 

Now in the back of my mind I assumed Digg had overtaken Slashdot but that was the extent that I'd thought of it.  Now that I was thinking about it again I decided to look into the current numbers.  The results were pretty shocking to me (which is probably an understatement).  Here's the Alexa chart (based on reach) over the last verifiable 6 month period...

If you're missing it the Slashdot line is the one very close to the bottom.  Here's the chart from Compete.com for the last year...

Again showing that Slashdot has been decimated. 

I'm amazed the tables have turned this dramatically in just the last couple years.  Again, I think we all knew Digg had overtaken Slashdot but what's amazing is how Digg has utterly usurped the need for Slashdot in the first place. 

This article from the Guardian quotes Slashdot as having around 5.5 million users as of August 2006 while the Compete numbers put their 2008 user count at around 785,000.  Even accounting for the inaccuracies of sites like Alexa and Compete this is pretty damning.  They'd both have to be WAY off for it to make much difference. 

It would seem like the Internet as a whole has chosen the wisdom of the crowd over the wisdom of the Slashdot editors and there's little Slashdot can now do about it.  I can't say the outcome isn't deserved (Slashdot never really responded to the Digg threat) but I also can't help being a little saddened by how diminished Slashdot has become.

Beyond that I can't help but wonder if this is an indictment of experts in general or of just the Slashdot editors in particular.  I'll admit to thinking they were a bit out of touch by the beginning of 2006 and I think that might have a lot to do with Digg's quick ascension.  But has our society really reached the point where we simply have no interest in expert opinions anymore? 

I love Digg but I'm not sure following the crowd exclusively is a philosophy that's very wise...

Caroline McCarthy covers social networks for CNET over on her blog (aptly titled "The Social").  Today she has a post entitled "News Corp. reportedly buys something--but it's Beliefnet, not LinkedIn or Digg".  In the post she says...

There must have been something afoot in the crisp, early-December air that hinted News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch was in the market for a new Web acquisition. But, contrary to rumors, it isn't social news site Digg or business networking hub LinkedIn.

Rather, the media conglomerate is rumored to have purchased religion and spirituality site Beliefnet, according to a report from the FishbowlNY blog at Mediabistro. The blog received an "anonymous tip" that prompted a call to Beliefnet, resulting in an odd no-we-won't-deny-it comment that convinced FishbowlNY editor Noah Davis that it was pretty much a done deal.

It amazes me that people are surprised by this.  There's no question that we have a secular culture in the United States but that doesn't change the fact that roughly 87% of the population actively believe in one religion or another.  The fact that most of the mainstream tech industry scoffs at this market is exactly why Beliefnet (from what I've seen a rather weak entry into the Social space) does so well. 

I'll make the point even clearer: In the World there are 2.04 BILLION more Christians, 1.44 BILLION more Muslims, and even 840 MILLION more Hindus than there are Facebook users. 

The idea that targeting a market that big would be surprising shows a prejudice on the part of the tech community that is both unseemly and naive. 

Scoble has a post about how Digg has become a (as he puts it) “stream of noise” and how it would be better if there was a Digg type site that featured the picks from a select group of people (a point taken from a larger post by Dave Winer)

My first thought after reading Scoble’s post: ”wasn’t that what Slashdot was?”   

The answer there is that yes, that is exactly what Slashdot was but the Slashdot guys got lazy and/or too selective so people moved on to a better group (which is what the initial Digg users were) The solution to this problem (imho) is one of those that is easily identified but hard to accomplish.  Someone needs to make software that (a) makes it easy for people to share what they want to share and (b) makes it easy for other people to aggregate their friend’s shares in to a mix they prefer.   

The first point is a biggie.  If Scoble reads a bunch of personal blogs by friends and family I don’t necessarily want to see that and I doubt he necessarily wants to show it to me.  Any solution that hopes to accomplish the above has to come up with some way for users to pick which tags they wish to share and any software that tries to make this work needs to find a way to allow the users to pick without making it tedious.   

As I said, easy to identify but very hard to do.