This is an interesting article at the NYT about SlashDot's new site "idle" set to compete against DIGG.  There are some interesting quotes from CmdrTaco (Slashdot's founder) about how DIGG is broken.

Basically it comes down to the debate around the "Wisdom of the Crowd" vs. "The Tyranny of the Mob".  I am of the opinion that DIGG is a "Tyranny of the Mob" site where a small vocal minority can drive stories.  You can read through the comments in the article and see the support for that argument. 

I've written about this before with regards to DIGG vs StumbleUpon: Digg is broken - Virtual Schrödinger's Law.

CmdrTaco echo's my opinion.  An open platform that relies on the wisdom of crowds is prone to coercion by a vocal minority.  This reflects our political system that is a representative republic and not a popular democracy.

Is CmdrTaco an Elitist then?...

We here at the palatial headquarters of techRivet.com would like to thank all the visitors to the site.  Here is a nice graph that shows said growth.

So I love the Stumble Upon toolbar. I like it as a user, it can be a real time suck. I like it as a blog owner because it can drive traffic like nothing else I've ever encountered. It is simple, easy to comprehend and just plain fun.

I was curious as to what other competitors might be out there. And I found a few.

Stumble Upon toolbar - http://www.stumbleupon.com/

The market leader. They have a well designed toolbar, website and backend system. The sites can be rated with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down button. Lots of additional features but they are all superfluous. The only thing that matters is that you can submit a site easily, rate a site easily and view a random site at the click of a button. Simplicity drives the success of this toolbar.

Streakr - discorveryBar - http://www.streakr.com/

A direct competitor to the stumble upon toolbar. The one problem I have with it in comparison to StumbleUpon is the handling of categories. SU allows you to choose a subset of categories from which to return a site. Streakr lets you choose All categories or One category. Neither one of those choices is exactly what I want. A bit nitpicky of me I think.

The Random Site toolbar - http://therandomsite.ourtoolbar.com/

Bills itself in the same space but it is not quite as good. It pulls you back to TheRandomSite.com with a featured content link. It is also slower than stumble upon. This is a sub-optimal solution and we should not pursue this technique.

Google random site button - http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-04-18-n70.html

This random button is a secondary install for the google toolbar. It returns a random site based on your previous search history. The returned sites don’t seem to be as interesting as an anecdotal review.

I have some organic traffic. I have some links from friends and associated bloggers. I've joined online blogging communities like Bloggst, MyBlogLog and others. I participate in other blogs comments. But all that results in about 25% of my traffic. (or less).

Stumble upon provides the rest.

This is fascinating and relates back to my earlier post on Virtual Schrödinger's Law.

This traffic generating engine that is Stumble Upon represents a shift in the way traffic is garnered on the internet. You used to have to cultivate relationships, you used to have to suck up to power users. Now you don't.

Create a piece of content that is compelling enough, interesting enough, well written enough and get it submitted into Stumble Upon's database of URLs and let the horses run wild.

Democracy of Crowds

It's the democracy of crowds. I don't want to use "Wisdon of Crowds" because I have had both "wise" articles and foolish ones explode into a link spike from stumble upon.

The key then of course becomes to continue to generate quality content and feed the mouth of stumble upon.

We have seen lately the complaints surrounding the gaming of "Digg". [linky] Wherein a small number of power users influence the vast majority of Digg ratings. First of all these people need a life, secondly this highlights the primary weakness of Digg. It rewards power users. It does this if in no other way by allowing people to see the links and how high they are rated and who voted on them.

Virtual Schrödinger's Law
Each single piece of visibility into the workings of the system makes it less efficient. Knowledge of the effects you have on the system affects the outcome of the system. This is the Virtual Schrödinger'sLaw: you cannot both see the content and see the rating on the content without being influenced by bias.

The wisdom of crowds gets influenced by the bias of crowds.
Unpopular topics to the biased crowd will not get as many dissenting votes. There is an echo-chamber effect that then occurs. A self-replicating bias entrenches itself. People outside of the crowd bias do not participate, the vision narrows and the echo-chamber shrinks.

Digg becomes biased.

If there were a system that allowed for a "digg" or a "bury" without any of the "ego" feedback that is given with digg.com, a more democratic outcome could be achieved.

There already is a system that satisfies that requirement.

It's called stumble upon.
Stumble upon provides the voting functionality without the "ego" feedback loop. In essence it hides the useless UI. The end user has no list to traverse, the wisdom of crowds is not influenced by the bias of crowds. The Virtual Schrödinger's law is upheld.

After installing the stumble upon toolbar, practically nobody goes to the stumble upon site. You don't need to go there, there is no point. You don't need to read any lists. All you do is set up your interests / categories and the sites are brought to you.

You vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down and that's it.  Egos of power users are not stroked. The quality of the site and the potential for its rating to go up or down is not influenced by arbitrary bias. [linky] btw - my experience with traffic closely mirrors the last link's.

You don't see the link and the rating on the link at the same time. The rating on the link is hidden from the user.

The wisdom of crowds is not influenced by the bias of crowds. QED.

Update: Here is the wikipedia entry for Schrödinger's Cat: [linky]. Also there was a comment left questioning my use of Schrödinger instead of Heisenberg.  I think it may be a valid point, but I like the cat thought experiment.  [Heisenberg]

Update 2: Someone else has posted essentially the same article: http://www.howtoliveonline.com/2007/06/why-stumbleupon-is-better-than-digg-to.html