The Next Step in Social Bookmarking: Digg's Kevin Rose Focuses on Affinity Groups

CNET social media blogger Caroline McCarthy covers the speech of Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps conference  in London, where he focused on Digg's efforts to widen its audience appeal. While Rose confirmed that 30 million fans of Digg showing up on your doorstep each month was a great thing, he is starting to focus on how to broaden Digg's audience and to improve is relevance to specific audiences. Digg's registered users total about three million according to Rose, which is a sizeable number of people to drive active content bookmarking and discussions, but Kevin is still looking for ways to harvest more usable meaning from the data that Digg accumulates. Already Digg is using data from members who are apparent "trend setters" to power its beta-feature "Upcoming" view of content categories, but he intends to make it easier for people to find content with people who have the same affinities automatically. I assume that this means something like "Amazoning" Digg content (people who liked this also liked...), which is a good step in the right direction, but a fairly small step given Digg's overall impact on the Web.

Digg has done a lot over the past year to improve its usability and readability, but the potential for social bookmarking still outweighs its realized value in many instances. Here are a few thoughts as to how Digg and other social bookmarking services (and the media outlets that benefit from them) can work better:

• Invest big in "Diggable ads." Right now advertising in social media is suffering from a dearth of endorsement power as people concentrate more on content that's been endorsed by their peers via services such as Digg. Digg is looking at how to make ads "Dugg," which is likely to be a key factor in returning greater value from online display advertising. Currently the only feedback that advertisers have that an ad is working are click-throughs of one kind or another. Being able to get feedback from audiences that are viewing ads but not necessarily in a context where they want or need to click through can be invaluable feedback for marketers - especially when this behavior can be correlated with demographics and tastes. When audiences see that their like-minded peers are tuned into a marketing campaign it is bound to increase the power of an ad's endorsement - and drive up the revenues from those ads. This is likely also to accelerate the use of ad networks to place sponsored content in a Digg-centric ad network as well.
• Build communities around comments. Although social bookmarking service Newsvine is a mere blip compared to Digg's overall traffic, it has done a good job of creating interest groups focused on key topics and enabling both private and public discussions of those topics. People can read and comment on a group's bookmarks and original articles or they can join a group to contribute their own pieces of content. This enables more focused groups of interest to contribute content that would otherwise get lost in the noise. Digg is probably the best bookmarking service overall in managing the relevance of widely popular topics and does a great job of keeping comments clean, but in general Diggnation's comment threads don't seem to have much topic-specific sense of community around them. Diggers find great content, to be sure, and their system of managing comments is actually quite good - definitely superior to Newsvine's overall - but it lacks a sense of real relationships between the commenters in many instances.
• Focus more on being a publication - and enabling publications. While Digg is a powerful tool to aggregate content, its presentation of content in readable form falls far short of its potential to be an automatically assembled publication for its target audiences. People who have been following along as I have been writing the Content Nation book know how in Chapter 10 's futuristic scenario a person in the future is enjoying his "Diggpaper" that's been assembled automatically for his enjoyment. Digg and services like it should think more carefully about how their front page, topic specific pages and stored searches can be formatted to look more like a publication that people are going to browse as an integrated source. This would mean the application of taxonomies and other tools that are readily available, and it may not be feasible in all topic areas if the content is not deep enough, but if people really are editing content as powerfully as many professionals do then it should think about giving its content more of a "stay a while" look to it.
• Finish the Google deal. The rumbles about pairing Digg with Google have subsided as of late, but thinking of this last point - making more of an editorial presence - most of what Digg needs to do that can be found in Google's news bits, which would certainly benefit from integrated Digg content ratings as well. Digg's potential is expanding far more quickly than its ability to exploit it, especially when it comes to partnering effectively with potential distributors, so a Google deal would mean that it would have far more broad access to partners and channels that would help to turn it into a premier source for news on more fronts and to consolidate its position as the leader in social bookmarking.
  

Digg continues to grow like a weed, but just as Kevin Rose opted for a cleaner haircut lately it's time for Digg to focus on reaping its potential more effectively. I'd say a doubling of its uniques in a year would be a realistic target - with the right partners. It's time for Digg to be not only brilliant but also to play well with others on the next level of its capabilities.