Web Guide One

News happens every day. Everyone knows that, but do we really know that? The real question is how much news gets lost every day behind piles of entertainment trivialities. No one’s really sure, but the website Digg was the first to offer a unique way of combating this growing issue. Digg is known as a “social news” website, and refers to the fact that users vote up the stories they find most interesting. That means in addition to common news articles (“Senate passes bill to quash pirate websites,” “Burger King employees fired for printing ‘f— you’ on customer’s receipt”) you’ll find other articles that catch the collective curiosity of webgoers (“13 awesome and awful pilots for sci-fi series we never got to see,” “10 craziest haircuts in sports”).As you can tell, it’s easy to lose a few hours searching through Digg’s listings. In fact, this article is taking an insanely long time to writemainly because I wanted to see just what those 13 sci-fi pilots were (two examples are an American adaptation of the British hit Red Dwarf and a Jack Black-Owen Wilson collaboration called Heat Vision and Jack, in which Wilson played a talking motorcycle). However, the best part of the site is discussing the articles with other users and voting up your favorites. When the website launched, there was also a “bury” feature which allowed users to vote stories down, but that feature was removed in Digg v4 (released August 25, 2010).In addition to voting and commenting, Digg offers other social interaction features as well. For instance, there’s a friends list, so you can get easy access to other people with similar tastes. A Facebook Connect option was added in 2009, allowing Digg-ers to log in with their Facebook account and share articles on their Facebook page. Digg Dialogg lets users submit questions for a particular celebrity, who is then interviewed by a Digg reporter.The site started out in 2004 as a simple experiment created by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. The original site was ad-free, but the users added Google AdSense in 2005. The latest version was released in August after a showing at the summer South by Southwest Interactive Conference, where Digg held its annual “Bigg Digg Shindigg” and promised that the site would be “getting a major overhaul and redesign.”Whether you’re a web newbie or an old pro, there’s a lot to enjoy at Digg. Just make sure you plot out a few hours first. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go read about “the 5 most easily avoidable movie deaths.” Number 5: Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace.