Portfolio

Rigg

This project was a group final project for i247: Information Visualization in Spring 2008, created with fellow iSchool master’s students Srikanth Narayan and Christina Zhong.

Digg.com is a popular news aggregation site in which users can contribute news stories and feedback on those stories through positive “digg” ratings or negative “bury” ratings. Theoretically, stories with stronger feedback end up on the front page of the website, and conversely weaker stories are pushed off the front page.

We hypothesized, however, that significant collusion among a small, elite group of Digg users was actually responsible for most of the major activity on the site. These users seemed to have created a way to monopolize the front page for their own stories. By broadcasting to their “friend” lists, which included other colluding users, these users could ensure that their stories received the most positive feedback possible.

Our visualization was thus intended to examine a number of variables to determine the true impact of collusive practices on the site.

The above image is the main Rigg interface. On the left, the different story categories and the number of active stories for each.
In the center section:

  • On top, the current front page stories for the selected category, with lighter colors representing friend diggs and darker colors for non-friend diggs. Stories benefiting from collusion would theoretically have much higher proportions of friend diggs.
  • On bottom, the current list of upcoming stories — ie, those not yet on the front page — and similar color coding to indicate feedback. In the final Flash interface, we intended to use animation to show diggs added to stories in real time.

On the right, specifics for individual stories selected by the user, including the rate of friend and non-friend diggs over time and the amount of time needed for the story to reach the front page.

The Rigg interface, with a story selected for more details.

More on this project:

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