Digg Dialogg Launches With Nancy Pelosi Interview

Digg users have yet another reason to believe they have more influence than anyone else on the 'net now: Digg's new feature, Digg Dialogg, allows Digg users to create questions that will be posed directly to famous/influential people in the world. First up to bat is Nancy Pelosi. If you have any experience with Digg commenters, I'm sure you can already imagine the "interesting" questions that have already been written.

The system works very much like Digg's bread-and-butter news service. Users submit questions that are then voted up or buried by other users. At the end of the submission time, the questions with the most Diggs will be posed to Pelosi directly as written. Supposedly, there will be no filtering of the questions, just a plain old vote to determine what will be asked of our Speaker of the House. There are plenty of questions already out there, and I'm assuming many more will be posted before the cutoff time of 11:59 pm on 8/26. Pelosi will be interviewed on Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention.

This move resonates in harmony with the CNN/You Tube debates held last year, in which You Tubers were invited to submit questions to the candidates. The biggest difference is that the questions for the You Tube debates were filtered, but the questions here are not. I think that it is great to see politicians interface more directly with the public, in particular through the Internet, but I'm also a bit worried about what kind of questions will come out of "Digg Nation." Reading through a huge chunk of the questions, it seems that the Digg crowd was fairly responsible in they're digging and burying, but do we really need to ask Nancy Pelosi about legalizing Pot three or four different times?

To illustrate a point about Digg users and the digging/burying behavior and why this may not be the best forum to voice all the Internet generations concerns, I posed a simple question: "What is your stance on the current version of ENDA, which leaves out protections for Trans people?" I posted the question as I started to write this story. It has now been effectively buried past the viewing threshold. If a system is so homophobic as to not even allow that question to remain on the table, how can it possibly be representative of the internet age? I didn't expect it to hit the top of the list, but to be tossed aside so quickly speaks wonders about "Digg Nation."

All-in-all, I think it's a positive step forward for the political world. This is the first of many promised celebrity interviews, so expect many more to come in many more walks of life.