The Race to Beat Google
The Race to Beat Google: I think a key thing that is missing from this is looking at the metric of how the amount of signal effects noise given any solution. If the relationship is not inverse, then you have diminishing returns with the more amount of people. Digg is facing this. Delicious is not. Google is not as their algorithms are strengthened by more noise applied, which consequently strengthens the signal (or Information in the Shannon sense). A lot of these other contenders don’t scale with noise, and don’t provide ascending returns. When I look at new technology or services, I always try to extrapolate what the return is on growth both in terms of monetization (the bandwidth vs. advertising conundrum) or in terms of algorithms and social structures.
I guess one thing Digg could do is lower the weighting of influential users who only contribute to a limited range of topics (for the sake of the homepage), this might encourage users to diversify the sites they submit. Another thing might be to give new users a temporary weighting boost (that trails off back to normal over a period of a few months) so that they’re encouraged to stick around and build up a network of friends.
Oh yeah, in your first sentence did you mean “affects” rather than “effects”?