My practicum project is on social bookmarking websites. I had previously been aware of several such sites, including Stumbleupon.com and Digg.com. I decided to begin my practicum foray with Digg, the site I was a little more familiar with.
Many webpages around the Internet have little icons that look kinda like this:
If you like the site/page/article/etc., you can click that button and it will add your "digg" to Digg.com's count. The link will then show up on Digg.com next to the number of "diggs" it received from Internet users world-wide. In this case, 123 people digged the following link:
From what I've seen, a link can get up to as many as several thousand diggs (I would imagine it is capable of tallying many more, although it doesn't seem like a popular enough site to garner that many votes). Moreover, Digg encourages its users to register an account and then comment on the links; it promotes active engagement in the site's features.
Digg.com consists of pages of links people have "digged" (or maybe it's "dugg"), but users are able to customize the kinds of links that appear on their accounts. For example, if you want Digg to show you articles from The Onion, it will post Onion pages that others have dugg. You can sort links by genre (technology, politics, sports, etc.) or (like me) you can just check out the daily top diggs, which are posted at the right side of the homepage:
Next, I'll take a look at Reddit.com and I'll compare the two over the course of the practicum project.
I've never used Digg, but I agree that it seems like one of the more popular bookmarking sites. I tried Stumbleupon before but didn't get much out of it. I created an account and made selections of what type of content I prefer. But the suggested content didn't match up with my preferences (maybe I picked too many?) and some of the content was outdated. It seems like the hits on Digg stay recent.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with your practicum! I'll have to watch for your next post to see if Reddit seems like a good site.