There are a few (tech) blogging topics that are eternal. Comments vs. no comment.  A-listers vs. non-A-listers.  Techmeme sucks vs. Techmeme is still teh hot.  Also, for those in social media: Digg is pwned by a small number of diggers.

Yes, in a bit of unverified research that would have fit in the tech scene in 2006, popFail has “dugg up” (sorry, couldn’t help myself) some data that confirms what Digg management has furiously tried to avoid over several iterations — that a few individuals pretty much own the front page of Digg (specifically, 10 users have submitted over 30% of front page views).

In Digg’s own defence, those that make up that top 10 are quite different than what I remember in the past, so perhaps its efforts at “democratizing” digg has had some effect (although perhaps not in the way it was originally intended).

At any rate, I’m not sure if this “problem” will ever really be solved, as there will clearly *always* be a hierarchy of activity on social media sites, and there will, for any given activity, and there will likely be some kind of unequal power / logarithmic distribution of said activity.

That is, folks at the top are probably *WAY* at the top in terms of activity, “friends”, or whatever metric you’d like to choose.

If that’s the case, there might be algorithmic ways to change smaller details around it, but if this is indeed the nature of the beast, then there will *always* be diggers (or reditters, or mixxers, or propellers) that are more active than others, and always at the top of any “list”.