Recommendations for people who spend too much time online, Part 3: DIGG
Recommendation 3:
DIGG!
You may have heard of something called “Web 2.0,” if you run around in geeky enough circles. The general idea is that the latest, coolest websites all share certain stylistic attributes as well as some similar methodologies. YouTube, FaceBook, Pandora, Wikipedia and MySpace are all representatives of this new movement, and so, perhaps, is the entire Blogosphere. Perhaps the most common feature of Web 2.0 is user submitted content. The videos on YouTube, the profiles and blogs on MySpace and Facebook, the articles on Wikipedia, and even the radio channel programming on Pandora are all produced not by employees of the companies, but by Schmoes like us.
Digg.com is another website where the content is submitted by the end users. Digg is basically just a webpage with links to news stories on it. The ingenious thing is the way the stories are chosen to show up on the page. Instead of a team of editors deciding what we should know and what we should not, we decide for ourselves. Anyone who has signed up (for free) to be a Digg member can submit a story. All they have to do is type in a URL, come up with a headline, and click a button. Then, any member of Digg can see the story and either Digg it (give it a thumbs up) or bury it (well..it’s not thumbs sideways). Stories, pictures, videos, webpages, or anything else that can be identified by a URL that receive enough “Diggs” appear on the front page of Digg.com.
Professionally, Digg leans towards techno-geeks and politically it leans to the left. Nevertheless, I have found that it’s a wonderful addendum to my usual means of keeping up with the news (Reuters & AP top stories as well as Los Angeles Times headlines, all available online…and maybe a little Daily Show 
). If you want to keep up with technology and internet news, keep track of political races, get a smattering of injustices that need to see the light of day, the occasional crackpot conspiracy theory article, and a couple of funny pictures every day, this could be the site for you.
This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Reviews and Recommendations, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
