social bookmarking, one of those ideas i talked about back in my web 2.0 post , is still hanging around in my head. wikipedia says that it's "an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags." (social bookmarking - wikipedia)
del.icio.us falls into that category...so does digg. i use the former, but not the latter. in fact, i kinda don't like the latter. i see it as a sort of ripoff of sites that have been around longer (and ones that i actually visit/participate): fark and slashdot. in fact, there's a "competition" between digg and slashdot (at least in the eyes of digg users).
my beef with it, i guess, is that social bookmarking is still a useless idea. but i just said i use del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, right? ah, but i primarily don't use it to find my favorite links of other users. instead, it's a repository for all sorts of things i find interesting and probably will want to talk about later. beats the hell out of typing links into posts daily...it does it automatically. i'll admit, i actually will look at some user favorites, but that boils down to hunting for comic related links that i didn't know of, not "let me see everything this guy has found interesting." i reserve that for warren ellis, but that's because he's crazy AND and damn good comic writer.
hmm...come to think of it, my last non-link post mentioned the site boing boing and i commented on it saying "i must admit, i don't find anything particularly special about boing boing...i didn't even visit or stumble on it until this year, even though i knew of it." the same can be said of digg. the sites are virtually the same, just not in execution.
i don't know, digg just seems a little too cocksure and it shows through the users...of course, they are the ones who submit articles and vote on them, leading to some criticism which i'll link at the bottom. you know, that seems to be the m.o. of the entire web 2.0 movement: "we're doing great things and so we're great." i can't help but take issue with that. that arrogance even seems to be around the "gaming renaissance" and the "nerd/geek is the new cool" trends. actually, all three are somewhat interrelated (i know if there was a venn diagram for these, i'd be in the intersection). coming from being a nerd before it was cool to now, that mindset seems totally out of character.
and now for the criticisms of digg, as promised (though both authors say they use the site):
For Great Justice, Take Off Every Digg
"This article explains and demonstrates a conceptual flaw in digg’s service model that causes biased (or rigged) as well as lowest-common-denominator hype to be generated, causing a dumbing down of society (as a crowd)."
Digg’s Users Make Me Angry
arguing that digg and slashdot are too different to be "in a war"
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