Do You Digg?

The World Wide Web keeps growing every day and keeps allowing us to make it more personal for ourselves. With each new creation there are ways to incorporate yourself more into the web and take part in the Internet.

Social Bookmarking sites, such as Digg and Reddit are a perfect example of this personalization of the Internet. Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to "bookmark" or save links that they are interested in. From there, they can share their bookmarks with other users. Some social bookmarking sites have a ranking system where people can vote the story up or down on the social bookmarking sites page, and then the stories with the highest ranks are the ones featured on the front page. This is where the sites above come in.

Digg is considered to be "the largest focus group." The top stories that are featured are (supposed to be) chosen by the rank of how many "Diggs" they get.  Digg's website explains, "Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see. "

If you look at it that way, essentially us, the users are deciding what we deem newsworthy. This definitely has it's perks. A complaint throughout the ages has been that the news community never really has the readers in mind and only reports on what they want to. This system is controlled by the readers, who vote for  what they deem newsworthy and hopefully get that featured for all to see.

Now just because something doesn't end up on the front page doesn't mean no one reads it, there is always  to each his own. You can also personalize  your Digg to categorize posts and make it easier to browse the news.

Digg and other social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon which literally brings you to a random website at a click of a button based on basic preference information you gave when you signed up, contribute heavily to the info snacking age we seem to be a part of.

Will Digg and such sites completely trump the news for people's sources of information? Probably not for a while, if even ever, but it does give the consumer a fresh new way to consume and create their news.