私の話 || Matt Keoshkerian's Blog

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Digg... the new and improved Slashdot?

It's become a tradition that I keep up to date with news on my co-op workterms, because I find myself reading a lot of news (both internation and technology) while on co-op and completely ignoring the happenings of the world during school (I guess Grebel really is a bubble).
Anyway, lately I've been reading digg, which is a tech and science news website that aggregates articles from the rest of the internet, filters out the useless articles, and produces a front page filled with the latest happenings. Similar to Slashdot, but not quite.

Digg users submit articles to a queue and then others vote, or digg, on the articles posted, and if enough users digg it, the article goes to the front page for people to read. Otherwise the article gets lost in the sea of rejections.
Slashdot, however, has editors choose what is front page worthy. Users find articles, submit them to the queue, and, if the editors think its good enough, the story makes it to the front page.

Now, because of the nature of Digg, many more articles make it to the front page compared to Slashdot, which is a good thing as well as a bad thing. It's bad becuase a lot of articles tend to surface more than once, and often times articles that aren't too useful surface as well.
On the contrast, many articles that are useful get lost in the queue and never make it to the front page. However, recently digg was updated (article here|digg post here) to switch to a new way to view the queue, which would make the lost articles less of an issue.

One of the things I have noticed with Digg compared to Slashdot, is that Digg seems to get the stories out faster. Usually, I read Digg and then see the same stories on Slashdot nearly a day later! Thats quite a long time! Whether it's the users delay in posting or the Editor's delay in approving, the time is quite noticeable.

However, I still read both Slashdot and Digg... Slashdot does still have articles that digg never gets out there, and you know what they say.. Don't just quote one source!

So anyway, this whole long post was just to tell you people out there about Digg. With that said, I have added two links to my sidebar: A link to digg, and a link to the stories on digg that I have dugg (meaning I like it enough to "vote" for it). On rare occasions, I will end up linking to a story and writing my own little writeup about it here if it's one of those "so cool/interesting" or "hmm.. look at what Google did now" articles (like I did with Google Mobile and the CS vs SE story).

以上、よろしくお願いします