The striking beauty of early spring in California overwhelms the senses. The grasses are still mostly green, and flowers bloom all around on trees, shrubs, and smaller plants. This magical period is full of colors and scents, and lasts only a few weeks. Apple, peach, apricot, almond, cherry, and many other kinds of trees are in full bloom, often seem to be covered by chunks of snow.

It’s also tax season, which makes me spend more time indoors than I wish for. Time to dig up old receipts and wish I was more organized… yet again. I am indeed getting more organized each year, but it’s never good enough. I’ll do better next year, I promise.

Funny how things develop – less than a week after my last post, USA Today launched a redesigned site with many of the features I predicted. They’ve been obviously working on that for a long time, but I swear I had no clue :-). Anyhow, what they’ve done is a step in the right direction, but we’re not quite there yet. I guess it’s the right thing to do at this point – combine professional editing with crowd sourced editing, and let it go side by side for a while. Time will tell where they’ll go next – I predict that in time they’ll tone down the professionally edited part and highlight the other.

Like many, I’m inspired by the Digg phenomenon. The addictive virtues of Digg need to be studied – great topic for a PhD thesis. I guess the anticipation to see something new and exciting is what draws me in, like so many others. Almost every refresh diggs up some interesting links. The power of millions of editors voting democratically on each headline is unparalleled, and I predict that this method will be adopted by major media outlets and force many editors to go back to their old jobs.

A few weeks ago I changed my browser home away from Digg so I won’t waste so much time reading it, but still found myself typing D - i - g - g into the address bar several times a day.

I’m eagerly waiting to see what the upcoming competition will do to Digg, and how crowd sourced editing will change mainstream journalism. The challenge is to nurture a balanced community. I wonder if it’s an oxymoron; it seems like communities like the one created by Digg are driven by interest groups - in this case, geeks and early adopters. This is fine for sites like Digg, but think about the USA Today crowd for example - what will drive the reader community who will one day edit a general media outlet like this? how balanced will their editorial decisions be?