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Top 10 Digg stories on India in 2006
Does Digg look beyond Apple, Linux and
technology? Does the largely American audience
care about stories on countries like India?
OUR TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
30 March 2007 Okay,
Digg is the
phenomenon of the past year, and probably of this
year too, alongside
Youtube.
Over the last couple of years, it has often been
observed that Digg has become more of a Technology
- Linux- Apple news website, and less of a news
site. This is quite probably true.
Among the top users of Digg, there are quite a
few Indians. However, I have often wondered how a
country like India, upcoming technology superpower
and all, feature on Digg. The site still remains
mostly US-focused - and will obviously
reflect on what Americans think is important.
And so there is this interesting exercise. I
wanted to find out the top stories on India which
were published on Digg, and see what kind of
stories its users thought important about India -
to many, the land of many Gods, poverty and call
centers.
First, I searched Digg for stories on India,
and then refined the initial search results. The
rules which I went by were:
- The title of the post should contain the
word India
- It has to be published in 2006
- It has to make it to the front page of Digg
- And then rank them by the number of comments
it received
Conclusions? Does there really have a point to
it? Anyway, the idea was that if one could get any
insight out of the results of this little study -
not to prove anything about Digg or India. Let's
see where I got.
Top Digg stories on India
At the top was a post by
ivanb, pointing to the picture of
a new temple being built in West
Bengal, India. This story got 93
comments. The temple picture itself is
quite interesting - it does not look
like a typical temple built in the
typical North Indian or South Indian
style. The minarets are very much
there, but it seems to be illuminated
from inside. Quite a novelty. The
poster, Ivanb has been a member for an
year in Digg, and in that time has
submitted around 819 posts to Digg.
That is almost 3 posts a day! He has
quite a few posts which have received
above 500 digs and has dugg 20,745
stories.
This story was brilliant marketing
by Yahoo! India. They got India's
tech-savvy-socket-scientist,
Netsurfing president to ask a question
on Yahoo and milked the resulting
publicity well. "The question was -
What should we do to free our planet
from terrorism?" The poster was
mythbuster33, who had never before
submitted a story, and never again!
Someone from Yahoo! marketing? The
story was, of course, big enough on
its own - and someone would have
submitted it to Digg sooner or later.
The Yahoo! Answers question received
above 5000 responses, quite a mean
feat.
This post by
digitalgopher barely made it into
this years list - it was posted 315
days ago. The submission points to
zeenews, which based its post on a
post by gadget blog
engadget, which itself probably
picked it up from some other news
source. Digitalgopher has been on Digg
since October 2005, has submitted 2086
stories, and dugg 12122 stories. His
profile has been viewed on Digg some
106,035 times!
This story was submitted by user
diggaccount99. This is an
interesting chap. His account seems to
be disabled - click on it, and you get
a message saying that it is an Invalid
User. He probably was 'invalidated'
(to mean, made invalid!) by another
user
Xiol, who is the first commenter
on the post. Xiol is flabbergasted -
he had just submitted it in
Reddit (thought by some to be
Digg's closest competitor) and before
he could submit it in Digg, was beaten
to the post by Diggaccount99. Well, he
has added a smiley to his rant - not a
sore loser chap, I must say. The ship
is the River Princess, one of the many
which suddenly appear along India's
shores. They are usually a big
surprise when you wake up in the
morning and look out your beach
window, and there is a huge ship out
there! Usually, they are cut up and
sold as scrap in a while. Usually they
remain a tourist attraction for a
while, but I remember reading that
they are pretty damaging for the
ecology.
The poster is Roy
Schestowitz, who has been a Digger
for more than one year and has
submitted 1,265 stories. The story
describes the free software (to be
distributed in regional language
versions) by the government. The story
is topical, and had generated quite a
bit of buzz in the Indian media too.
The free software, though, is Windows
based - so unlike the Chinese
government's Linux plans for China, is
not really a setback for Microsoft.
Posted by
DigiDave (David Cohn), who has
been a digger for more than one year,
and has submitted 634 posts in that
period. I would like to applaud him
for posting this story though (and
giving me a future cover story idea
for this site).
This deserves to be on the front page of Digg,
at least from the Indian point of view. There is a
large market in India for gizmos and gadgets.
Thanks to the Web, the techie population and the
youth in India are very much aware of the products
that are released in the US, and when they see a
cool product, they want one. The Wired story talks
about how easy it is to buy a smuggled Apple
product in India. Thanks to the smugglers, Indians
can get iPods and laptops often at prices almost
similar to the prices in US. Comparatively, Apple
products (and most gadgets that have to be
imported) have ridiculous amounts of duties tacked
on to them, and no one in his senses would pay
that much of money to an authorised dealer. I
suppose I can write an entire 5000-word piece on
this topic, but I shall let it go reluctantly for
now.
Thank you,
IvanB! Here you are again with
another top India related story.
Predictably, we Indians are too quick
to react to perceived insults - and we
definitely have our holy cows. Freedom
of expression is not a sacrosanct
concept in India, and getting offended
is enough reason for anyone to
instantly call for a ban. The video
was removed from Youtube by the
comedian in question who kinda sorta
apologised for something I could not
understand. The comments by diggers
numbered 213 - most of whom said it
was retarded to bother to ban stuff. I
could not agree more. After all this
is a country where recently someone
was arrested for publishing a joke
book, FTV was banned only yesterday
for 'degrading' programming and
Orkut
and Mumbai police gang up to reveal
users' private information.
The original story is missing from
vcconfidential now - but this too
had made headlines when it was first
widely reported in the Indian and US
media. American youth seem to be
headed towards law and finance while
Indian and Chinese students seem to
gravitate towards engineering. That,
couple with the youth surplus in China
and India makes for a real problem for
future growth for the US. The original
digger
mbmccall is not a prolific poster
at all - goes to show that you don't
need to be a super-user in the Digg
hierarchy to get a post to the front
page provided the story is good
enough, and you get some diggers to
notice it.
p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 is the poster, and
he has been a member since February 5,
2006, and has submitted 1,484 posts.
Contrary to what I initially thought,
the workers in India who protested
were not bothered about outsourcing of
their jobs outside India - they
thought they faced a threat from
private companies within the country.
Interesting though - the employees of
India's Reserve Bank have some of the
most secure jobs in the country in the
public sector - but private companies
which can do a more efficient job at
lower overheads can pose a threat even
to them.
Indian law finally recognized
marital rape, sexual abuse and
emotional or verbal abuse as crimes -
and it made it to the Digg front page.
Important enough - and it is
heartening to know that stuff like
this which has no connection
whatsoever with Digg end up on the
Digg homepage. The original story
points to the Independent of UK. The
digger,
AAAZ, has been a member since 23
June, 2006 and has submitted 1834
stories to Digg.
Conclusions: For one, Digg is not a lost
cause if you look at these India-related stories
which made it to homepage. None of them seem to be
linkbait, none of them seem to be deliberately
trying to get Digg traffic. When a good post like
the Yahoo! Answers one comes along, even a newbie
digger seems to have attracted enough attention to
get it on the homepage. The marital rape story of
the Independent and the one on the temple are also
interesting, as they had nothing at all to do with
technology or Apple or Digg, and still managed to
get on the frontpage.
Will things stay this way, or have they already
changed? I am no expert on the matter - but we
definitely plan to check how Digg fares in a few
other areas that are of interest to our readers.
And probably Reddit too - but Reddit is a bit too
unheard of in India, so we will take a while to
figure out if it is worth it on this site. Signing
off.
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