Sunday, February 21, 2010

1 Digging Delicious just a bit more...


Here is another instance where I made an account I never used. (See my first blog post) Weeeeeellllllll, I have been a Digg member since 2008. No Diggs, no friends, no profile info...nothing. What a surprise, LOL.

OK, sooooo time to start digging in earnest, but before I launch into that story, I might add that I am an avid delicious user. I manage and keep fairly up-to-date three accounts: my work account digitalheritage; my personal account whatCLOknows; and wedding blogger account hindsightbride. I use delicious frequently throughout the day, but more on that later.
Digging the Internet:
Since I am fairly familiar with Delicious, and I am generally up for a challenge (read: creating more work for myself) I decided to give Digg a whirl. Of course my Digg user name is mtnhistory, like the blog you're reading.

First Moments on Digg
I was immediately impressed that I could see the trends in any given topic. Essentially Digg is a giant internet voting machine. Want to know what people are looking at right now? in the past 24 hours? past week? past year? You can see what others were digging. I can see this as particularly useful for following tech and education news. It is also a great way to keep up on popular internet culture.

After clicking around a bit and digging a few things, I set up my profile page. I like that I can link back to my delicious accounts. I like that I can friend people to see what they are doing. Unfortunately, none of my "friends" are active :( Is this another Gex X thing?)

Digg: What works; what doesn't
WORKS:
  • great for watching trends
  • helpful for promoting sites
  • very social; I can see what my friends are Digging...this may even spur a real life, real time conversation!
FAILS:
  • no user tagging feature (that I am aware of) Please correct me if I am wrong here, but I don't see a way to organize my links in a way that will allow me to find them again once I have "dugg" a bazillion pages.
  • I'll say it again: no way to effectively organize "dugg" pages, or if there is, it is not very intuitive
  • Not every site has a digg this icon. If I want to Digg something, and I am not a Firefox user, I have to toggle between the page and my Digg account (Firefox has a Digg plugin)
  • there don't seem to be as many people in my fields (education, technology, ed tech, photography) on digg. It's more trends and mimes.
Why I Like Delicious Better
  • Easily tag, organize and reorganize delicious pages
  •  Does not sacrifice the utility of bookmarking for the social side of things: I love love love that I can access all of my bookmarks from any computer. I love that I can easily import and export entire accounts. I love that I can import my local bookmarks.
  • I can find an follow users (if I so desire, which I typically don't)
  • I can watch trends on the delicious home page (if I so desire, which I typically don't)
  • I can key word search and both my bookmarks come up as well as others bookmarks with the same tags. Often times this yields much much better results than a mere Google search
  • Can feed delicious updates to my twitter, FaceBook, or blog accounts
The final low down
I'm sticking with Delicious as my primary social bookmarking workhorse. It functions more as a tool for me. To be frank, I just don't need another social (emphasis on social) networking anything right now. I am not deeply interested in making my internet vote count. I am already social enough through FaceBook and Twitter and the numerous forums and discussion networks I belong too. I don't need more social. I need more information and tools that work. Delicious works.

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