It is time for Digg Founder Kevin Rose to man-up once again. It is time to make Digg fully transparent. It is time to remove the barrier that hides the bury data from the users. Mr. Rose, tear down this wall.

Look at the front page of Digg on any given day – look sources of the stories:

Gizmodo, ThinkProgress, Engadget, CNN Money, ArsTechnica, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TechCrunch…

All great sites, but also all extremely popular sites. Sure there are a few smaller ones sprinkled in here and there, but more and more Digg is becoming a back catalog of the big boys.

Neil at Pronet today posted on a very interesting topic: that Digg is Censoring Content by Burying Stories Internally. Such a statement may seem too bold, until you read that he has a document with 10,000 buries to prove it.

Yes, the article mentioned in Neil’s piece happened to be one that I wrote, but it could have been any of them, he just chose to follow that one. The story, when submitted to Digg quickly gained some traction, people seemed to like it, up it went in the upcoming stories section. Then all of a sudden: buried.

Fine, you might say, it was buried, end of story. The only problem? The data shows that the story received ZERO buries from the time it was submitted to the time it was buried.

Then there are the reports of the suspicious crawl3.digg address in IP logs. This appears to be a bot that hails from Digg’s headquarters whose coming precedes the burial of the site. This was noticed months ago by Ramblings from the Marginalized.

Cut to yesterday on this very site. Someone submitted a story of mine which seemed to be racing towards the front page of Digg. With over 30 diggs in just about 2 hours it seemed like a shoe-in. Then when I went to check where it was in the ‘Upcoming Stories’ section, it was nowhere to be found. Too bad I thought, buried again. However, after doing a search I found that my article wasn’t buried.

It wasn’t buried, yet it wasn’t on Digg’s upcoming stories section; it was seemingly stuck in no man’s land. An hour or so later it finally resurfaced as ‘buried’.

I might chalk this up to some kind of error – and it very well could have been – but it’s hard to overlook the fact that every single story submitted from this site in the past 90 days has been buried. 21 submissions to Digg, 21 buries, 100%.

These were stories submitted by a wide range of users on a wide range of topics.

I’m certainly not expecting every story to make the front page – in fact I don’t think most of them should have – but I also don’t expect for each one to be buried into oblivion.

The likelihood that completely random groups of users independently decided that each of the 21 stories needed to be buried has to be very, very small. Especially when you consider that before that day 90 days ago, very few of my articles were ever buried.

So what changed 90 days ago? I’m really not sure. It was around the time that I started writing articles for Pronet, but making guesses as to why my situation is the way it is really looks past the bigger issues here.

From what I hear and read around the Internet recently, I am hardly alone in the “bury-bin” of Digg. More and more websites are finding their content buried for no discernible reason. Do people try to spam Digg? Sure they do, but there are plenty of hard-working writers out there as well who are just hoping that they can spread their talent/work/hobby to a broader audience only to be shot down without any explanation.

The true appeal of Digg lies in the interesting, outlying content, not regurgitating the big stories from CNN and The Washington Post. Yes, Digg has all the big tech news, but it gets it HOURS after anyone will a half-decent RSS feed has already read it.

If the outlying content becomes endangered, Digg will simply turn into a really slow RSS feed of what is popular in tech on any given day. What is the point of that? Nothing.

That is why I speak directly to Kevin Rose on behalf of both the writers out there who are trying to do honest work, and on behalf of those users who enjoy Digg for its unique content — MR. ROSE, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!

I implore you, make Digg fully transparent. A half-democracy is not actually a democracy at all. Make available the bury data. Just as you show who diggs what, show who buries what.

I know that the initial feeling was that this was not a good idea, that it might scare people away from burying stories. At this point I don’t think that is a problem anymore. Read the comment threads, if people can say such things, do you really think they’ll have a problem letting it be known that they buried a story?

On the flipside, it might be nice for a writer to know why his or her content was buried. If other people feel it was lame or if it really was inaccurate, the writer can use this information to improve their writing going forward.

Though there are heated arguments going on, I don’t think either side is opposed to the release of this information. To be frank, both probably think the data will shut the other side up – and maybe it would.

Or maybe it would show that you guys are in fact burying some content. If that is the case, just come on and explicitly say so. It is your company and you can do whatever you want, but don’t pretend to be a democracy if you are not, it pisses people off (see: the HD-DVD fiasco).

A completely transparent Digg could be a truly remarkable thing. At the very least it would stop all this back and forth and make huge gains to restore credibility lost in the wake of the HD-DVD situation.

It’s time Digg.

I don’t want to wake up a year from now and see Digg.com as nothing more than a rehash of that day’s CNN.com headlines without the pictures.

[if anyone out there is against Digg opening up its bury data please leave me a comment and explain, I honestly would love to hear your perspective on this]

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[UPDATE 5/15]: So after a few thousand pages views in the past few hours I still have yet to receive one comment from someone stating they are against the idea of showing who buries what on Digg. If you’re out there and feel this way, please let me know. No one is going to attack you, I just want another perspective.

[UPDATE 5/16]: TechSpews has made a petition for the cause. Go Sign It if you’re in favor.