Continuing with the Digg theme, The Guardian‘s Technology supplement today echoes blog chatter of the past few days suggesting that Digg will overtake slashdot.org as the tech insider’s news source of choice. This is a big deal in geek-media-land, but anyone on the outside may well ask: so what?
Well the intersting thing is how quickly a community-edited site (lest I need remind you, readers vote for Digg stories, which decides whether they are carried and their prominence on the site) can usurp a fairly established, albeit selconciously "underground" piece of media. Slashdot.org is something of a geeky / techy institution, its influence as a forum for the geekerati and a place for breaking news and contentious views is known and respected far beyond its immeidate readership.
So this predicted, perhaps likely, piece of geek media groundshifting has significance beyond its immediate readership too. Here’s some questions to get your mind spinning: will a Digg equivalent displace a mainstream news aggregator soon – Newsnow or Google News would seem to be ripe for this kind of disruption, unless they are already planning community voting/editing approaches.
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