First, if you reading this post and have never heard of digg.com, stop reading now and head over there, check it out. Better yet, spend a week over there to see how the site grows on you... then come back. My own impressions of it are unimportant, but what I will say is that I've found it one of the single most interesting real-time experiments on the web.

If you have spent time on Digg, you'll know that there is something there for everyone, but generally the cream rises to the top. For breaking news, it provides a good pulse as an aggregator, with enough off-topic links to keep it fun.

It's a simple concept, a bunch of people sign up and submit links, if registered users like it, they digg it. The more diggs any link gets, the better chance it has of being front paged at digg.com, which in turn means a huge rush of traffic to the popular stories or videos. I think of it like a vast user generated memeorandum.com for the entire internet, a portal for links that a substantial number of people take the time out of their days to mark as dugg (for this discussion, it's important to keep in mind that Digg is a website with well over 1M unique page views daily, and that being front paged at Digg is currently one of the fastest routes to fame and shame on the interwebs).

The title for this post may be a bit cryptic for people who don't visit Digg, so I'll try to explain what "Burying Ron Paul: Digg and the Free Republic" is referring to. Burying is the opposite of digging, so when a user doesn't like a link, they bury it. Ron Paul is a Congressman from Texas, and GOP presidential candidate, who has had many stories about him front paged at Digg in recent months (I would argue a disproportionate and irrational number given his relevance to the politics I've studied during the Bush era), the most recent of which is a link to a post about him on the Free Republic. While I regularly bury Ron Paul 'Truther' links, this one seemed exceptional.

I won't go into the reasons why any website of standing steers clear of linking to freerepublic.com, these are well understood by political blog readers, but I will note that a quick survey of rightwing blogrolls shows the Free Republic not getting any link love from even the more severe members of that set (also missing, Stormfront).

So back to Ron Paul. By some mystery, he has become a cause celebre on one of the internet's leading websites, and as a result of this, stories mentioning his name are consistently dugg up, which brings us to this morning when a story concerning Ron Paul was prominently linked on the front page of digg.com, with link going to what might be termed a 'hate site'.

This almost too-perfect groundswell of support for Ron Paul that has now legitimized the Free Republic as front page material at one of my favorite websites. Great.

There is a certain self-reinforcing quality to support for Ron Paul on Digg, one that is helped along by the relatively small number of political news sites and blogs that are promoted to the front page with regularity. For those who have the misfortune to be learning everything they know about politics through Digg, rather than through a wider exploration of the political media and blogosphere, it would be difficult to determine exactly who has earned credibility, other than judging by who is popular. This may work in some cases, but not in others, and I think the Ron Paul infatuation falls into the latter category. I'd like to think that the users of Digg were not susceptible to the sort of ignorant hive mind that would promote a website like the Free Republic, but that hope is no longer operative. Evidently, Ron Paul love requires no research or discernment to be exercised when supporting your man.

The unlikely arc of Ron Paul's rise to popularity on Digg is interesting, because this is a case where the alleged wisdom of crowds is now shaping the public debate (indeed, high exposure on Digg seems to be the first breakthrough for candidate Ron Paul's presidential election bid). Yet the wisdom appears, in large part, to be forming without the broader context given by the political media and blogosphere.

In the end, the link to the Free Republic raises all sorts of questions about how the social web will contribute to tomorrow's political conversations. To me, the Ron Paul meme illustrates a pretty serious failure of the social web (or Web 2.0,  as exemplified by Digg) to be discerning in its consumption and promotion of content. I love digg.com, but front paging Free Republic...seriously, WTF?

* An interesting conversation, which I won't even try to undertake, could examine how the Ron Paul meme was introduced at Digg, how it became an institutionally normalized behavior to digg news concerning him within the community, and what the impact of this meme might be on 'politically virgin minds' whose orientation presumably tends toward the progressive.

* It also should be noted that the early focus of Digg was on technology, and that the prevailing view of its users is that they are tech savvy, educated, and lean politically to the center-left if anywhere at all. The increasing number of political stories on the front page is a relatively recent development, and many Digg users may not be familiar with what political sites have credibility, so might not be blamed for promoting Free Republic if one is feeling charitable.