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The forthcoming US Elections have dominated the news for the last few months and that trend looks set to continue throughout 2008.

With the mainstream media beginning to recognise the importance of social media to the candidates involved, we decided to analyse the front-page stories from the 2008 U.S Elections category to find out what the results would be if the US elections were held on Digg.

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Photo by: EAWB

After our recent analysis of popular stories on social news and bookmark sites found that the Reddit community loved reading about politics, a couple of readers emailed us to say that the Reddit community was also one of the most intelligent - so we decided to put that theory to the test…

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image by Chris Campbell/flickr

How can giving someone less information lead to better decision-making?

In Blink, Malcom Gladwell examines how snap-judgements are often more accurate than those we reach after careful analysis. He says that we often rely on too much information in order to make the correct decisions. Gladwell claims that instant decisions are often more reliable - provided we focus on looking at the right information.

So what exactly is the most significant information we can use to determine what articles will reach the front-page on social news sites?

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Ever wonder what kind of content is most popular on the various social news sites? Well wonder no more…

We analysed over 500 front-page stories for Digg, Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us to try and determine what type of content is generally popular on each site (Note: this is 500+ stories for each site not the total).

Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon and Propeller all seem to only include the popular stories in their feeds. Reddit may also include stories that get votes rapidly over a short period of time. The results are based on RSS feed data so some stories may have been buried after we included them.