Just in time for the first day of the Democratic Convention in the U.S., Kevin Rose today announced a new feature on Digg: Digg Dialogg. The idea here is to allow the Digg community to submit questions that will then later be posed during interviews with “thought leaders and tastemakers.” The first person to be interviewed this way is going to be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The interview will be streamed live online on Wednesday the 27th.
Digg + CNN
Digg is partnering with CNN’s iReport on this. Diggers will be able to either submit their questions in writing through the Dialogg page or they can upload a video to iReport. According to Digg, they will ask the top rated questions, but given the often rowdy nature of Digg, it will be interesting to see if the questions will be censored in any way and how the Digg users would react if that happened.
As Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson announced last week, Digg will have a substantial presence at the Democratic and the Republican conventions. Giving Digg’s users at least some influence over the reporting from there falls right in place with Digg’s overall style.
Not New – But Still a Good Thing
Overall, there is, of course, little that is new about this style of doing interviews, which is quite similar to the YouTube debates. Even Slashdot, Digg’s virtual grandfather, often uses it to decide on interview question. At the same time though, anything to get young people interested in politics is a good thing in our opinion and Digg definitely has the ability to reach a lot of folks who would otherwise not be interested in the political process. Also, given that Digg, at its core, is still a technology site, its users are likely to ask a lot of tech oriented questions that a lot of the politicians probably never thought about much.
Looking at the top rated questions so far, net neutrality is ranking high above legalizing marijuana and repealing the Patriot Act.
