With the advent of Digg 3.0 the means the development of Social Bookmarking or my term Social Editorial has moved to another level. Social Editorial implies more than bookmarking or “Digging” but running commentary and a new feature “blog this” which implies an additional participation in the editorial. These new features allows different views of the story with accompanying feedback and commentary. It is the blogosphere that offers a more granulate or tailored view of the story that then feed back into the community.

In a perfect world, Social Editorial would result in a very accurate view of a population’s consensus, attitudes and concerns over a particular story. Given some more sophisticated spying tools, a polling of a populations view can be gauged including their understanding of the interaction between different stories including the newly added ones from blogs that fill out the story.

All these new capabilities to interact with the story creates a new context structure from where the story can grow and take on a multi dimensional view. In fact it is just this view that is currently being planned in a later version of Digg according to Kevin Rose in Twit Episode 59. (About 55 mins in). Kevin talks about the Digg 3.0 visualization tools that has a series of bubbles that represents the activity and the interrelationship between different stories. This will be available some time in July.

Andy Patrizio talks about in on Internet News

Digg Incoming will replace Digg Spy as the means for monitoring what’s being “dugg.” The Visualization feature shows each story as a bar in a bar graph, and several hundred bars can be shown on the screen at once. The new Swarm technology shows which stories users are “swarming” around as they become more popular.

What this means is that there will be some pretty interesting phenomenon we are just about to observe:

• Commentary will change and a wider audience will result in a higher degee of discourse.
• A wider and more diverse points of interest will emerge that will look beyond simple rants and raves of the traditional Digg commentary.
• Digg population will fragment into communities of interest revolving around blogs
• Good bloggers will build out the content and feed it back into Digg (and others)

Vishnu Mahmud talks about fragmentation here:

With Digg 3.0 introducing additional topics and catering to a larger audience, what made it unique may now lead to a morass of links and content. Instead of focusing on technology, there are now a lot more links and news to go through. The site still attracts tech geeks but now they can be further segmented.

To fight this Digg will need to come up with a more sophisticated community categorization system than currently they have that takes into account the diversification as well as the need to better segment discourse.

What does this mean for traditional journalism?. When blogs first appeared, they were isolated. By that I mean you had to find them and they would link back to the story they are commenting on. A great example of this is Washington Monthly by Kevin Drum. We would need to follow is arguments against what he provides as the source.

I believe over time that Digg with its community effect will act as the hub in the community and provide the context to the story by linking and rating all the elements in the blogosphere.

Both Political Powers and the Traditional media will also have a hard time reacting. In Washington Week with Gwen IFil, a question was asked what impact Blogging and the Internet is having on Politics. The consensus is that everyone now aware of this and is trying to make sense of this. A number of senior politicians including Hilliary Clinton have hired blogging “experts” to assist them. This means that the traditional media over time will be forced to react not just to the blogging itself, but the social networking that is going on behind it. Therefore:

• Traditional Media will start feeling the effect of Social Commentary. They will initially ignore this structure
• Traditional Media will recognize the importance of this review process and look for opportunities to increase their exposure.
• Media companies will start to tailor content for this medium and may result in Digg baiting stories to drive traffic into their sites.

However, will this result in a democratization of the news process result in another type of consumer pandering that has existed in TV for a long time, ie. the pandering to the new social structures online? This remains to be seen however at this time in the Web 2.0 history, it seems to be a great vantage point.

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