In today’s fast-flowing river of information, it seems that just about every publication is masquerading as ‘truth’. Ironically, even when we encounter truth, there is a lack of credibly in actually differentiating truth from falsity. How are we to know what’s masquerading or not?
Even more ironic, (and possibly hypocritical to my previous thoughts) is that the closest we can get to the truth is actually knowing and learning about each other. This is where blogging and Internet fascination comes into play. Real life personal accounts, stories and happenings are what really direct our everyday thoughts and actions. Reading about some Frenchman’s traumatic lovers quarrel, or a Chinese office hilarity, feels more like truth and journalism to me than reading about the Dow Jones. Naiveté? possibly… Realist, definitely.
Granted, it is still important to educate oneself on hard news, which brings me to the Web site digg.com. Doing what several online servers such as Wikipedia and facebook are doing, this site strives to combine the world of journalism with the personal freedom to write whatever one chooses.
Digg claims it “is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the Digg community.” Users contribute articles with headlines ranging from “Ultra-Green urban skyfarming of the future” to “How we learned to stop having fun”.
Although the site has a lot of text and isn’t exactly visually stimulating, the Digg has enhanced features such as RSS feeding and a ‘bury’ option to weed out spam stories.
The nice thing about Digg is that it isn’t personal informational crap made up by someone with way too much time (as far as one knows). Users find and submit articles, videos and podcasts from other news and entertainment sources on the internet. People vote yes or no on the information’s significance, and “once a submission has earned a critical mass of Diggs, it becomes “popular” and jumps to the homepage in its category.”
This site offers online goers to seek and share relevant information more easily without having to Digg through the millions of Web sites. The Digging is confined to one, hopefully credible, place. I found out about Digg.com through Chalk magazine, so I would imagine that the site’s credibility parallels that of the magazine publication: Honest young people trying to get and receive stimulating information as easily as possible
“Share, discover, bookmark and promote stuff that’s important to you.”
Is this masquerading as journalism, or the real deal?
On digg.com, you get to decide.
Comments (1)
I'm supposed to be on Facebook, but when I saw this I knew I was going to comment.
I am an avid digg.com user. I was a digger back when the site was white and yellow. We're talking version 2 here. Back in the dizzay.
A lot of spam (or stuff you would see in Weekly World News) does come through regardless of user vigilance. People will be amazed at the grotesque and offensive no matter what. The system has been gamed for money before, and digg has done some regulation. But user freedom is still a top priority.
Digg users, however, are the best. I'll give you an example. Something known as the "digg effect" has been named after the site because sites will shut down when thousands of digg users attempt to simultaneously access it.
To comepnsate, in the "comments" section, users will post links to mirror sites that host the cached content of the down site. This can take money and time and the users have nothing to gain but recognition from random people. This user solidarity and altruism is seen nowhere else on the Web. Maybe I'm a little proud.
I think that digg.com is journalism at its best. When people are able to democratically vote for news, the people get what they want in every way. Of course there will be lots of "OMFG Pics of Britney!!!!1!!" stories, but there will also be extraordinarily quick news updates. Digg.com was one of the first news organizations to have pictures and descriptions of the London subway bombings. Digg makes everyone a journalist. Obviously not everyone is suited to be a journalist, but I think that the benefits vastly outweigh the consequences. When everyone has a say in what is heard, we get what we need to hear.
For more information, watch the podcast.
http://www.revision3.com/diggnation
Sorry about the sloppy link, but it won't let me do it right.
Posted by Adam Schoof | April 5, 2007 5:11 PM
Posted on April 5, 2007 17:11