Monday, March 24, 2008

Digg your way to the top

The next stop throughout my journey of the online community involves a deep look into social news sites. For some it’s a tool to branch out and advertise their ideas or product well others use it for its general purpose of posting the most interesting stories in a place that could attract a mass audience. When discussing the big dogs of this crazy world, Digg is the first site to some to mind for most people. Digg is a very large and well-known social news site that posts stories by category and popularity. It has so many users right now that on the front page of the site which shows 15 stories posted by users the 15th story was posted only five hours and will be pushed into archive pages by the time the sun comes up.
Social news sites are considered a revolutionary new way to get a voice and gain supporters especially now that Digg decided to allow political stories on there site. Allow is a funny word when it comes to these kind of sites because even though the goal is to give the little man or the nobodies a voice the editors can quickly take it away. It works effectively if the goal is to stop hate stories or false stories all together but I do find it kind of contradictory to do such a thing. If these sites were made for that exact purpose it doesn’t seem fair to only allow a selected few to be posted on the site. Overall I would say social news sites are a great idea but when the get to the size of one like Digg where hundreds of stories are filtered in daily it becomes much more difficult to continue following the original goals for the site.

1 comment:

Kendra said...

First, catchy title! Second, although these sites are kind of selective, I find that it is almost necessary. There are so many networking sites that allows comments about the most random topics and I think at times there needs to be some form of control of what is posted and what isn't. Especially if these are working towards helping businesses, then there needs to be more control. If people are interested in other sites that allows them to put their input on it, then they can go find them since there are so many of them.