The stories on Digg’s Page One are appearing more and more like a cliche to me–especially the computer-related tech stories. It’s getting…well boring.
So I’m wondering, could someone write a program or neural net or whatever that can predict which stories hit Page One on Digg? After all, there’s an algorithm behind Page One that places those stories there in the first place.
Let’s see, without knowing any of the real algorithm’s details and only what’s public on Digg, could someone create a web service called pageone.org where you could enter a proposed story, title, and snippet and then click the button “Page One Worthy?” and get a score predicting whether your submittal will hit Page One on Digg?
Would the title be the major factor in predicting success? The poster? The time? The story itself? The rate of the first diggs? The topic?
Would a Digg predicting service be more successful than the weatherman? Heh.
I better be careful what I think about here. Someone might write such a thing. I can imagine how Diggers wanting to up their success rate might use it to tweak their posts to get to the first page thereby leading to an even more uniform set of front page stories. Ew. Then again, maybe some competitor will take the bait and provide a free Page One predictor service not only to better understand what their competition is doing, but also to get a chance to pitch their site before the person posts it just to Digg. 🙂 The rest of us might use it to get a chuckle about how predictable–or not–Digg is.
This sounds like a fun summer project…Oh well, fall is coming and its about time to go outside again here in Phoenix :-). Maybe it’s a good winter project for someone in cold country.