NT23: Thing 15 - Digg / Dugg

So anyway, I gave Digg.com a try; It was easy enough to set up a Digg account via Facebook, actually, which was awfully convenient & painless.

I poked around on Digg, "dug" a few stories, which then appeared on my Facebook 'wall'. I even found a story I had read earlier on Inside Higher Ed this morning which I decided to "dig" as well. It had only 1 Digg, but at least it was there, and I added my Digg as well.

It seems to be inspired by the whole "wisdom of the crowds" Meme that's going around these days, and seems to have some validity too it. The most active users are apt to be the most techno-savvy and for bleeding edge technology news, Digg is probably very useful. Ditto stuff that is all around "Cool". But I can't say that it's necessarily more interesting than, say, BoingBoing.net, for example. I bet the editors at BoingBoing.net probably use Digg.com as a research tool, among many others, but for the end user, unless you have a home built PC running on Linux, or have similar levels of techno-moxy, I don't know if the lay user will find much that is appealing about Digg. It's like a massive web-wide popularity contest. Sometimes it pays to heed the word of the Vox Populi Digitalis, other times, less so.

As a lay user looking for "cool stuff", I'll let the editors at BoingBoing do their work on my behalf and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Regularly perusing BoingBoing keeps me hip and cool. A nice antidote to BoingBoing on the other hand is the blog Stuff White People Like, which holds up a fun mirror to my own existence and lets me laugh at myself. It's scary how much SWPL pegs me, deflates my ego, undermines my hip pretensions, nearly every time.

Reference librarians will probably find Digg.com more useful than I do as a cataloger, since they deal with the public much more directly. No doubt it can be helpful at the reference desk as a jumping off point.

Anyway, on to the next "thing". Digg/Dug/done.