After watching the story unfold about the blog post that appeared on Digg that was dugg over 15,000 times and appeared on page one of Digg. The Digg Effect as it has become known is a phrase given when this phenomena occurs. Many times if a story becomes popular enough it will appear on page 1 of Digg and the result is traffic soaring to the point of bringing most servers to their knees and crashing many sites. This Digg Effect has taken on new meaning for me since seeing the resulting revolution that unfolded.
For me, the "New Digg Effect" is the power of social networks and communities. This can be used for good or for bad actually. In my opinion, posting something on a site that breaks the law or goes against a terms of service rules can be a very bad thing. Mob rule takes over in this new action. This is not necessarily unique in the instance of Digg, but its popularity was shown and the number of people that can influence an outcome was apparent here. As I read a comment by Paul Montgomery at Tech Crunch it came clear to me that this could be a New Digg Effect:
I agree with the users on this one. They win. I just wish they could turn their power on some issue that actually mattered. (emphasis added)
That made me think of the power that social networks and communities could wield in other areas. The viral effect of this new medium. It made me think of things like the Amber Alert System, and then I began to think of the power a mob could have on a Presidential election in online communities. I’m not sure if the New Digg Effect has me running scared at this point or in awe how quickly something can travel from shore to shore and continent to continent when a group wants something accomplished. Social Media and the online communities carry a new torch at this point. Like Paul Montgomery said, let’s use this New Digg Effect for something that really matters.
Hello All,
This is a very interesting piece making us understand both the positive and negative effect of the trend of so called the New Dig Effect. Social media and social communities boost your image, increases knowledge and also build up your credibility. Its truely helping people connect with each other. Yes people can misuse this system but putting in spams but technology has provided us the ways also to prevent the spams. So if science and technology has given us the tools for our use, we should use them to our maximum advantage
The dig effect is knowledge, which gets read repeatedly. This phrase should become popular as more and more people use it in their day-to-day conversation and reports. Such things take some time since the web may not be accessible to everyone. When its used in offices and more people know what it means, it should be a common term all over the world.
I fully agree with the writer that web world has created a viral effect and we can see ever now and then new sites popping up and building their networks and increasing their revenue. If we click on one site that leads us to another and there is whole lot of sites linked together. So it is digging that goes on.