List Crazy Diggers

[UPDATE 08/22/2008, 12:10 AM]

I wonder why diggers are just list crazy?

At the time of writing this post (yesterday), here are the 'lists' from the top 100 diggs on the digg front page -- almost 16 of them! What this means is that on every page there is at least one 'list' type of an item. (And I have noticed this trend for some time now)

1. 5 Reasons to Write Down Everything You Eat For a Week

2. 6 Worst Movie Posters Of 2008

3. 15 Fugly Faces of George W Bush: Commander in Grief [PICS]

4. 10 Movie Trailers That Were Better Than The Actual Movie

5. 10 Coolest Chuck Norris T Shirts Ever!

6. 7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code

7. 15 Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped

8. 10 Great Webcomics You Should NOT Share With Your Kids

9. The Top 10 Rookies That Will Impact the NFL This Season

10. The 5 Most Baffling Sex Scenes in the History of Fanfiction

11. The Top Five Weirdest Olympic Events!

12. 9 Linux Myth Debunked

13. Stephen Colbert's Top 7 Drug Moments

14. The Top 7 Girl Gamer Stereotypes

15. Top 10 Songs Over 10 Minutes Long

16. The 10 Skimpiest Superheroine Costumes

Lists can be entertaining and fun. But I wonder why we see lists enjoying such high popularity in digg? From a cursory glance, the comment activity on 'lists' is comparable to any other item. So my guess was simply that the 'Top Diggers' have a greater inclination towards lists. 

[UPDATE 08/22/2008, 12:10 AM]

To understand what was going on here, I turned to the expert, Dr. Kristina Lerman, who has extensively studied the Digg Community. Following is an excerpt from her response to my question about the popularity of lists on Digg:

"......did you notice how the amount of communicated information is shrinking? First we had Twitter, that advertised 128 chars or less in a message. Rather than being an inconvenience, other services followed the trend: "videos in 5s or less", or other bite-sized chunks of information. Lists are part of that trend, but not only do they communicate information in a convenient bite-sized chunk, but they also rank them - another passion of the current age. It seems that people are really averse to expressing thoughts in long paragraphs." [Text highlighted by me]

Digg is essentially a news site, but the audience probably loves the quick, bite-size and neatly ranked information that such posts provide. Even on traditional news reports and TV shows the "top 10"   whatever-odd-ball-potpourri land up being a part of the reporting.

Here are links to some of Dr. Kristina Lerman's papers on digg and a video of her talk (@Google) on Social Information Processing.

Kristina Lerman (2007), User Participation in Social Media: Digg Study , in Proceedings of the International Workshop on Social Media Analysis (SMA07), Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology [pdf] [bibtex]

Kristina Lerman (2007), Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg, in Proceedings of Int. Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO,USA (poster). Extended version available on arXiv (cs.HC/0612046)

Thanks Kristina for your sharing your thoughts on this new trend!