As I mentioned here a few weeks ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) answered questions on a Digg Dialogg, a joint project between Digg and CNN’s iReport. Digg users gave the thumbs-up-or down to submitted questions, just like a regular Digg article submission, meaning that the most “dugg” questions were asked. Of course, as MediaShift’s Simon Owens points out, the more Digg users engage in politics, the more apparent it becomes that conservative articles and issues are not being, well, dugg. Why? It’s possible that the most vocal Digg users liberal tendency was mirrored in the two conventions: a younger crowd, more tech-savvy, lit up the Democratic convention with text messages and interactive maps. The Republican convention was more technologically low-key, relying instead on a loyal base. It isn’t that Republicans, by and large, don’t buy into new media, but perhaps they don’t need to. So why would they dig Digg in the same way tech-savvy liberals do? This doesn’t make Digg biased. It’s a platform. Digg’s users, on the other hand, have no responsibility to be fair or balanced in the articles they choose to promote. So the question becomes, if conservatives are worried that social networking sites aren’t promoting their messages, do they either jump on that bandwagon, or do they stick to older, but tried-and-true tactics?
Originally posted September 9, 2008 at PolicyByBlog