The Net Monkey

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a new social bookmarking site on the block called Digg, started by Kevin Rose, formerly of TechTV. Here’s what it does, according to the site.

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

Digg combines several well-established concepts in to one site. Social bookmarking became popular with sites like del.icio.us. Blogging has exploded all over the place in the last few years, with RSS riding on its coattails. Kuro5hin introduced a user-controlled editorial system many years ago, which, for the most part, worked pretty well. Digg also sports an AJAX-enabled user interface, which, in an of itself, is based on technology that has been available for a long time.

In terms of actual content, I’m having a hard time figuring out how it is much different than getting the RSS feed of popular bookmarks from del.icio.us. The only difference I see is that each entry has user comments. Unfortunately, most of the comments I’ve seen are brain-dead, user-moderated blatherings that do nothing more than exemplify the fact that geeks are a bunch of whiny turds who only like “cool” stuff. It’s like reading Slashdot.

As not to be a total Negative Nancy, I do want to say that I think their concept is good — seems like a natural evolution for social bookmarking sites, actually, but I do have some suggestions.

• Ditch the user comments. I think they’re useless.
• Introduce a tagging system, especially one similar to Flickr’s which has clusters and the ability to put spaces in tags.
• With the introduction of tagging, I would keep the categories. I think allowing people more options to find content is a good thing.
• Automatically weed out duplicates.

Digg is obviously an experiment that will evolve over time. They take some great ideas and combine them in to something pretty cool, in concept, but the reality is that I’m going to stick with del.icio.us, for now.