Social information processing in news aggregation

Social media sites underscore the Web's transformation to a participatory medium in which users collaboratively create, evaluate, and distribute information. Innovations in social media have led to social information processing, a new paradigm for interacting with data. The social news aggregator Digg exploits social information processing for document recommendation and rating. Additionally, via mathematical modeling, it's possible to describe how collaborative document rating emerges from the independent decisions users make. Using such a model, the author reproduces observed ratings that actual stories on Digg have received.