Digg

As with many other social softwares (is that the right plural?), I had a passing knowledge of Digg. I had seen Digg chicklets and read about Digg, but never really explored it. I chose to review Digg because I'm a (very passive) user of Goodreads, and a quick look at Librarything and Shelfari told me they were very similar services. After another quick look at the other three options, Digg had the most asthetic appeal, so it won my review for this week.

Digg is essentially a user-edited "news" aggregator. I use the term "news" very loosely, as recent headlines include blog posts about last (Tuesday) night's debate, an article about a video game for wannabe DJs, and a picture of a cow with a child's toy car stuck on it's head. Digg is very easy to set up and has a pleasing interface. There are various categories at the top, and a small arrow next to each heading lists several subcategories, which is helpful if you're looking for something specific. However, the point of the site isn't to search for a specific article, it's to discover news that really is new to you. Submitting a link is fairly easy as well, though the several links I tried to submit were already on the site. However, you can make something more popular by "digging it," clicking the "digg it" link next to a headline. If you click on the number of diggs, it goes to a statistics screen about the link - when it was "dugg," who has "dugg" it, who has blogged about it, etc. On the negative side, because the site is user-edited, there are a huge variety of sources, and you never know what you're going to get. For some, this may be exciting and interesting. For others, it may be overwhelming.

Although there were a lot of interesting and positive points about Digg, I don't know that I would continue to use it in my personal life. The immense variety of sources, both authoritative and not, was a little off-putting. Additionally, though the categorization is great, I would get annoyed by having to click back and forth between categories. Overall, Digg is a very well-designed site with lots of interesting features, but it's just not for me.