the wisdom of crowds: is digg the new slashdot?

anyone involved with developers and community has had experience with slashdot at some point. and no matter what your experience, you have to respect the traffic they can heave your way. however, the slashdot effect is not just about traffic, as jason kottke correctly points out, but rather the influence developer communities can wield given longevity, trust and human editorial touch vs. pure traffic. snarkdot probably still has the influence edge on these grounds - so far.

or does it? kottke further speculates that digg comes across as more "bursty" (my favorite new community adjective) in his traffic analysis than slashdot because a higher percentage of its audience reads the site via RSS because they're younger, "grew up with newsreaders in their cribs", etc. social networking + RSS + developers = the new slashdot?

then, I happened upon this competition site, diggvsdot, where points are awarded +3 for first post, +1 for ties (within 50 min) and even negative points for ripping off the title & url of a news story. looks like digg is on a roll. turns out that speed of information combined with RSS alerts, can start winning you a lot of influence, esp among the younger set.

so the wisdom of crowds in the digg vs dot debate comes down to how you define the influence of a developer community over the long haul. bursty can be beautiful.

can you digg it?