I Digg it.

My Digg experience started with an attempt to add friends.  When I first joined, it immediately gave me a choice of where to search for friends, and I chose to link Digg to my hotmail account.  Unfortunately, it never found anyone that I knew.  Still wanting to add friends, I decided to do a search.  I typed in a few of my friends names who I thought would be most likely to use a site like Digg but again, found no one.

Giving up on adding friends, I moved on to the main page.  I was shocked to find the types of articles that had made it to the top of Digg.  Going into this, I assumed that Digg would be somewhat like Fark.  The types of articles that I always hear about/ get sent via e-mail are usually either really big news stories or funny articles so that’s what I expected people to be digging.  Most of the stories I saw, however, were about technology (mainly Apple).

Another thing that I didn’t realize about Digg, was that it’s more than just news articles.  For instance, the article that showed up second from the top on the homepage the last time I logged on was just spam!  The headline was about healthcare but when you clicked on it, all that was there was an ad.  I was also not anticipating to see cartoons on their but sure enough I stumbled on an article called “America: We’re (Not) #1” that was a comic.  Later on in the week I noticed that people dug videos and pictures too.

Seeing the videos inspired me to add my own YouTube video to Digg. No one dug it except me, but at least I put it out there.  Other than my own video, the only other thing that I “dug” was an article about a potential cure for breast cancer.  The only thing that I buried was the “spam” article.  When I clicked buried, I got a message that said “Buried! We’ll try to give you fewer ads like that one.”  This made me happy because if I keep burying things I don’t like maybe Digg will start giving me articles that are geared more to my interests so I won’t have to sort through a bunch of articles that bore me.

As far as commenting goes, I am not a fan.  I hate commenting on things because I rarely have anything to say, but for the sake of this assignment I did comment on one article.  The article was called “The REAL Difference between Europe and the USA” and it was a picture of a bunch of comparisons about the U.S. and Europe.  For example, there was the title “architecture” with two pictures of American architecture and two pictures of European architecture under it.  I honestly didn’t get which was supposed to be better, so that’s what I wrote.  It was difficult for me to figure out how to comment, because unlike on YouTube, not all the comments are listed along with the article itself – only 3 were shown.  Since I wanted to read what other people were saying before I wrote anything, I had to click on the small link that said “comments.”  Although I could see what other people were saying by clicking the link, I could no longer see the article which I thought was dumb.  Scrolling down I found the pink box that allowed me to add my comment.

Overall, Digg was a fun experience.  I enjoyed reading the various articles that other people digged.  Some of the articles that I read were from a paper in the U.K. which is something I never would have found on my own.  Although I doubt I will ever use Digg on a regular basis, I can definitely see myself browsing the site on nights when I’m procrastinating or when I’m bored at work and need something light to read.

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