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October 26, 2005
Sites You Should Know - Digg.com
Well, I've officially given up on pulling together posts of substance while I'm away on vacation. Lucky you, I've got hours and hours of surfing under my belt. In these posts labeled “Sites You Should Know” I will profile sites that I believe make the Internet a better place to live for one reason or another. The Lifehacking theme will probably be well-buried in these posts, but it is my hope that my motto “Better Balance” rings clearer with each post. Some sites you may know, some will hopefully be new.Enjoy.
Digg.com – This is a social....something site. Not sure what to call it really except to say that it is the brain-child of Kevin Rose, whom you may know from the old ScreenSavers. In a nutshell, people post links to sites that they've found interesting which fall under such geeky categories as Technology, Software, Movies, Linux, Science, Robots and more.
What makes Digg different from other sites where links are submitted by readers (Slashdot.org, Fark.com), is that Digg stories are promoted to the front page not by ivory-tower editors, but by fellow readers. If you see a story that is interesting, you can click an icon to “Digg” the story. The more Diggs a story receives the higher it climbs, potentially landing it on the home page. While there have been some abuses of the system – you can create multiple accounts and digg your own story – these are infrequent enough that they do not become annoying or substantially call in to question the validity of front page stories. For the most part, the Digg front page is ripe with fascinating and often very useful sites. For instance, as I write this, an employee of Blockbuster has posted an “employee only” code for getting a free month's trial of their online service (promotion code: bbstore).
There are also a host of great feature including a “friends” section that allows you to add fellow diggers to your friends list. When you come upon a story that has been dugg by one of your friends, a green band is superimposed on the “digg it” button, so you know a friend read the story and liked it. Furthermore, if you hover your mouse over the band, you'll see the friend's name and avatar.
RSS feed is also available for pretty much anything that you can imagine.
Posted by Andy Mott at October 26, 2005 06:00 AM