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.

Gender Differences In the Blogosphere

We had to read an article THE GENDERED BLOGOSPHERE: EXAMINING INEQUALITY USING NETWORK AND FEMINIST THEORY which discussed what propotion of political bloggers were women. They took samples over a one year course and found out that a mere 10% of political bloggers were women. The reasons that they gave for this were 1. Women simply don't blog about politics, 2. Women's blogs lack quality and 3. The most popular blogs do not link to women's blogs.

It is pretty obvious that politics has been a "men's world" for as long as we've known it, so it's not very surprising to see a lack of women political bloggers. I personally do not have much of an interest in politics so this doesn't really shock or effect me much.

The second reasoning they give, that women's blogs lack quality, seems a bit absurd. However, I would agree that if women are blogging they tend to add their own opinions and feelings into the blog more often than men do. This may be an off putting thing in a blog if someone is trying to find hard facts about a political issue. The reader would not want to have to wade through 3 paragraphs of the writers personal opinion.

Lastly, the linking hierarchy that has been created by men. As previously discussed, we know that "info snacking" is the new way to surf the web. Therefore, if the most popular blogs are linking to other blogs, those blogs will then get tons of traffic sent to their site. Now if men are only linking to other men, it pushes the women's blogs even further down into the abyss that is the internet. Women can help change this by only linking to other women, however that could greatly affect the quality of their blog.

In the end, perhaps with the times changing and the prospective of more women in politics grows so will the appearance of women political bloggers.

The News is a Treat

This week in class we took the time to watch 'Frontline New War: Part II.'
The movie covered everything from the beginning of the news era up until now and even a bit into what the future has in store. They discussed heavily how the news nowadays has gone soft, and the news reporters main priorities are not even reporting news. While I can understand and agree with this concept to a point, seeing as how today's media is so obsessed with celebrity and fame, I also disagree in many ways. For every 'soft' story in the news line up there are at least 5 tragic ones to make up for that. I do not think that our time and effort should be put into investigating the celebrity cases before the real news, but I also do not think it is killing the news media to include it.

The video also said that due to profit motivation a lot of the news has lost it's sincerity. Once again, this is a concept that I full acknowledge but I do not think it is so cut and dry like that. Obviously we are aware that more or less everything these days revolves around money. However, just because a company sponsors a television show or station, does not mean we must then like and buy that product. It is a bit more enticing to  us when it is shoved in our face, but it is up to us as the intelligent viewers to make up our own minds about things.

The topic that was discussed that I was the most interested in was "info snacking." I am for sure a big time snacker. I cannot even tell you how many times I have sat down at the computer to do one simple task and 5 hours later still be on the computer, and probably not even with the first task fully completed. For those who do not know what info snacking is, NPR did a little blurb about it that I think fairly describes it's entire entity. With all the new and emerging technology out there, as well as social networking sites, it's nearly inevitable that everyone has "infosnacked" at one point or another. StumbleUpon is a wonderful site to start up your info snacking.

That being said, it's about time I wrap this up and get to snacking.