(hat tip to Mashable’s Stan Schoeder)
There is a qualified rumor being spread around pertaining to Google’s recent developments on the purchase of Digg. From the Digg site:
Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.
Long story short, Digg exists to rank blogs or content based on qualification from a group of people. You can usually find the DIGG button on blogs in your Google Reader or any type of blog aggregation tool. If you like the blog you should digg it!
So why would Google want to buy Digg? Ever since the purchase of Myspace by Murdoch’s Media Company we have seen a decline in the value of a large group of people on a social network. Today the social media world is judged based on an active and vibrant community it represents.
Digg has great traffic and it allows for the ranking of content whether visible to the Internet community or not. Stan makes a great point by stating that one of the reasons Google might want to purchase the site is the influence it has in the blogging and content community.
Another reason Google may want to purchase Digg is simple: They can. Whether or not the Digg community will bring any validity to Google as a company doesn’t matter.
When purchasing the Digg community there is one thing Google needs to remember. Keep it the same. The last thing Google needs to do is change the Digg platform or try to reinvent a wheel that already works. The acquisition will work if Google remembers not to alienate the Digg community.