Random observations, teachings and musings of a well trained cubicle superhero.
http://j1.ca
Friday, March 14, 2008
March 14. 2008
I dig on Digg - What's the sense in social bookmarking?
Jay, a.k.a. “The Cubicle Superhero”, is a self-professed tech junkie with a passion for music and culture 
Email Jay
I've got cool friends. I'm not bragging, just the opposite. I'm so painfully uncool that I try, at every opportunity, to surround myself with as many hip, talented and clever people as I can. I hope to effectively leech as much cool as I can off them as possible.
Effectively that's what the subject of today's story lets us do; leech off the cool finds of others, for our own amusement. Back in August of 2005, at the urging of the aforementioned cool friends, I attended a "meetup" for fans of a TV show then called "The ScreenSavers," which (at that time) was co-hosted by a dude about my age, Kevin Rose. I had the pleasure of hoisting a few with Kevin afterwards while talking about a "little side project" he had been putting together, Digg.com.
Fast forward to 2008, and a post to a major technology blog, "TechCrunch," suggest that both Microsoft and Google are positioning themselves for a buyout of said project. Given that a previous offer fell in around the same amount, this totally believable (but later debunked) rumour quoted a potential payday just under 300 MILLION dollars. Jeez.
So what's all the fuss about? Call it social media, collaborative web-crawling or shared bookmarks. There are a few major players in the game: reddit.com, digg.com, stumbleupon.com, de.licio.us and the uber-leet slashdot.org. Incidentally, de.licio.us, was acquired by Yahoo! in December of 2005.
The concept is deceivingly simple. Let's say that through the course of normal browsing you happen (stumble if you will) upon something you think is cool and you'd like to share with your peers. Through a simple web interface any of these sites will enable you to note this site to your own online list of bookmarks, with a brief description. This basic functionality is somewhat like Rogers Yahoo! Bookmarks. Your friends can now browse your bookmarks and share theirs' with you.
This is where the fun begins. Digg, Yahoo's MyWeb and the brand, spanking new Yahoo! Buzz take this concept further by rolling in a ranking component.
Digg has moved ahead of the pack, defining itself as an Internet destination by publishing the "most dug" sites to the front page. Subscribed users can click through the sites their friends have added to their personal Digg pages and provide their opinions by choosing Digg or Bury. A dig votes the site closer to the popularity list, and closer to the front page. Buried behind that front page lay the pages listing less dug sites. Any user can select the "Bury" option to push the listing lower in the rankings. It's mob rule on a grand scale and it packs a punch. The "Digg effect" can cripple servers with sudden unexpected traffic spikes associated with a top ranking.
As Digg grows, it has become more than a place where nerdy web surfers hang out to share cool sites. Digg founders are now planning regular Digg townhall meetings, where subscribers can meet up in person or virtually through online discussions. Just want the gist? There's even a rogue, beer-fueled video podcast listing the top websites dug that week. Admittedly, the language is R rated at moments, that is, when the language is intelligible at all. Ahh beer.
So many sites doing the same thing, what makes them different?
What makes de.licio.us different, besides its sparse appearance and strange name, is that it was the first to allow users to add the site to their de.licio.us bookmark list and add tags to help them search them out.
Tags are very useful and function like key words. If you had a list of 1,000 links, it would be very difficult for you to find a specific link. What can you do? Well, create a tag so that you can search for it easier.
Let's say you wanted to bookmark this super informative article on one of these sites. You would copy and paste the address and then you can add tags to help you find it. "Cubical Superhero" would be a great tag, so when you type it in, Tech Mates would appear so you can refresh your memory with my pearls of wisdom.
This tagging system now is available on most of these social bookmarking sites, making it easy for Joe Average to hang out with the coolest sites on the web that interest him.
Stumble Upon lives on your computer in the form of a toolbar, making it super easy to add sites. The real power of this service is the stumble button. After telling the service a bit about yourself and your preferences, clicking Stumble will randomly take you to a page that somebody else had "Stumbled Upon" that matches your interests.
Reddit, owned by Wired Magazine, seems to follows the same style guide as de.licio.us, and is a simple site where users submit web pages and can move it up and down the list through their votes. No comments, no tags, a great site to discover random websites.
If you're as painfully uncool as I am, then check out these sites so you can run with the cool crowd for a bit and leech off their finds.
Jay, a.k.a. “The Cubicle Superhero”, is a self-professed tech junkie with a passion for music and culture Email JayEffectively that's what the subject of today's story lets us do; leech off the cool finds of others, for our own amusement. Back in August of 2005, at the urging of the aforementioned cool friends, I attended a "meetup" for fans of a TV show then called "The ScreenSavers," which (at that time) was co-hosted by a dude about my age, Kevin Rose. I had the pleasure of hoisting a few with Kevin afterwards while talking about a "little side project" he had been putting together, Digg.com.
Fast forward to 2008, and a post to a major technology blog, "TechCrunch," suggest that both Microsoft and Google are positioning themselves for a buyout of said project. Given that a previous offer fell in around the same amount, this totally believable (but later debunked) rumour quoted a potential payday just under 300 MILLION dollars. Jeez.
So what's all the fuss about? Call it social media, collaborative web-crawling or shared bookmarks. There are a few major players in the game: reddit.com, digg.com, stumbleupon.com, de.licio.us and the uber-leet slashdot.org. Incidentally, de.licio.us, was acquired by Yahoo! in December of 2005.
The concept is deceivingly simple. Let's say that through the course of normal browsing you happen (stumble if you will) upon something you think is cool and you'd like to share with your peers. Through a simple web interface any of these sites will enable you to note this site to your own online list of bookmarks, with a brief description. This basic functionality is somewhat like Rogers Yahoo! Bookmarks. Your friends can now browse your bookmarks and share theirs' with you.
This is where the fun begins. Digg, Yahoo's MyWeb and the brand, spanking new Yahoo! Buzz take this concept further by rolling in a ranking component.
Digg has moved ahead of the pack, defining itself as an Internet destination by publishing the "most dug" sites to the front page. Subscribed users can click through the sites their friends have added to their personal Digg pages and provide their opinions by choosing Digg or Bury. A dig votes the site closer to the popularity list, and closer to the front page. Buried behind that front page lay the pages listing less dug sites. Any user can select the "Bury" option to push the listing lower in the rankings. It's mob rule on a grand scale and it packs a punch. The "Digg effect" can cripple servers with sudden unexpected traffic spikes associated with a top ranking.
As Digg grows, it has become more than a place where nerdy web surfers hang out to share cool sites. Digg founders are now planning regular Digg townhall meetings, where subscribers can meet up in person or virtually through online discussions. Just want the gist? There's even a rogue, beer-fueled video podcast listing the top websites dug that week. Admittedly, the language is R rated at moments, that is, when the language is intelligible at all. Ahh beer.
So many sites doing the same thing, what makes them different?
What makes de.licio.us different, besides its sparse appearance and strange name, is that it was the first to allow users to add the site to their de.licio.us bookmark list and add tags to help them search them out.
Tags are very useful and function like key words. If you had a list of 1,000 links, it would be very difficult for you to find a specific link. What can you do? Well, create a tag so that you can search for it easier.
Let's say you wanted to bookmark this super informative article on one of these sites. You would copy and paste the address and then you can add tags to help you find it. "Cubical Superhero" would be a great tag, so when you type it in, Tech Mates would appear so you can refresh your memory with my pearls of wisdom.
This tagging system now is available on most of these social bookmarking sites, making it easy for Joe Average to hang out with the coolest sites on the web that interest him.
Stumble Upon lives on your computer in the form of a toolbar, making it super easy to add sites. The real power of this service is the stumble button. After telling the service a bit about yourself and your preferences, clicking Stumble will randomly take you to a page that somebody else had "Stumbled Upon" that matches your interests.
Reddit, owned by Wired Magazine, seems to follows the same style guide as de.licio.us, and is a simple site where users submit web pages and can move it up and down the list through their votes. No comments, no tags, a great site to discover random websites.
If you're as painfully uncool as I am, then check out these sites so you can run with the cool crowd for a bit and leech off their finds.
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