An interesting discussion started yesterday, if digg (and all similar networks) is a user generated content site.
Allen Stern argues, that
With Digg, you find a good piece of content, and then submit a link to that story on Digg. That’s it. The Digg submitter submits 250 characters to describe the story but 97.85% of the time, the submitter is pulling the description from your story.
Therefore the content of the submission is actually a link (disregarding the short description). If we compare Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit with Youtube and Wikipedia, User Generated Content has a completely different meaning.
So Allen considers digg a UGC aggregator.
On the other hand Josh Catone, relies on Wikipedia’s definition of UGC to say that:
Stern’s objection to Digg being a user generated content site seems to focus around the word “content” — as Stern argues, much of the submitted content is unorginal. But the comments on Digg, no matter how useless some might find them, are original media content provided by the users for publication on Digg — which is enough to fit the Wikipedia definition, at least (and this is why we might say the comments section on any media site are an example of user generated content).
Surely YouTube and Wikipedia are traditional UGC sites, but Digg is also one. At least it is “…a user something site”.
The eye of the beholder
Most of the comments in both posts agree with A. Stern, that Digg is not a UGC site. As I remarked in Stern’s post, I believe, that the definition is in the eyes of the beholder.
- You can say that the content OF Digg is generated by its users. Which is true. Everything you see on the digg site is uploaded by users. So it is a UGC site.
- But you can also say that the content ON Digg is actually the links pointing to the actual source. Which is also true. You cannot judge a post just by the short description on digg, you need to go to the actual source. So it is not a UGC site.
Emerging subjects
- Semantics: as Sean Tierney and Tim Marman commented, the debate is based on the fine term of content. A similar debate could be started about blogging. If you have a link-blog (comments enabled and all the blog stuff), is your content generated by you, the user?
- Hypertext: Roland Barthes has argued (and that in the late 60s), that “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.“ Which means, that the reader is the one who will actually combine all the hyperlinks/citations used in a text in order to comprehend the text as a whole. Content is all the links/references used in a text. Under that perspective, maybe digg is indeed a UGC site. The hyperlinked nature of the web constitutes almost every writting, user generated. You just have to follow the links.
Update 23.01.2008:
My question is: if digg is not a user generated site, why does google link to its content?
