Digging Made Easy

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Often compared to Reddit, Digg is possibly the most influential social news website in the word of social media. All content are maintained and moderated by the Digg users themselves. It brings together people who wants to discover and share content thru link and story submission, site votation, commenting. Arguably, it set the precedent of story submission and voting systems of other social media networks today.

Digg, according to Wikipedia, started out as experiment in 2004 by Kevin Rose and a bunch of people. The aim of the group was to give Internet users a chance to submit and vote for interesting stories at the same time. The beauty of this site is that it helps the user avoid precious time by not effectively sifting thru the barrage of stories by getting what other users have sifted through out there on the net.

There are three special but simple features of Digg: submitting, digging and burying.

Ø Submitting

A user needs to register to be a part of Digg’s 1 Million plus members. After registration, go to your email address to verify your identity and you are set to go.

Second step would be to create a user profile which will serve as your personal page. Here is where you can display your photos, put your personal information as well as links to your other favorite sites.

After creating a profile page comes the building of network. Building a huge and diverse network will enable you to get stories from different genres. You can keep track of those as well as shouts, or messages that you can send to other Digg members.

As for submitting a story, you can do this by going directly to the submit a story tab. It is kind of exciting to see that your story has been dug for numerous times. What happens after is wither your story will get enough digg’s to move to the main homepage or it will eventually disappear if there’s not enough hits.

Ø Digging

Then comes the digging or voting for stories. Trying going to an actual Digg article and you’ll see on the left part how many diggs or hits a story accumulated. Every story you digg gets saved on your account for late viewing.

You can also dig through news stories, videos, images, even podcasts using the filter tabs.

You can also make a mini-review or comment about the diggs by clicking on the comment link underneath the story description.

Ø Burying

If you don’t like a story because of incorrect information, dead links, spam, or even lameness, you can click on the link on in the problem drop-down menu. When a story or article gets enough reports, then it gets buried by disappearing in the Digg queue and only appears in your or other members’ respective profile.

Digg offers up a couple of advantages for its would-be members. First, it is a great source of stories which can be described as “diamonds-in-the-rough” for a lot of its users are solely concentrated on promoting the best stories may it be about videos, tutorials, etc ranging from food to politics. On the same note, stories which get lots of diggs end up on the main homepage otherwise known as the Digg Effect. This causes traffic to be driven to your site and people to read your posts.

But there are still some who don’t like this popular social news media platform. Take for example Sean Kelly, writer of Experiment: 60 Days of Digg. According to him, Digg proved to be a big disappointment. Proof of this is short article summaries, grossly misspelled words, and content-free comments. But then he compared Digg to Slashdot, saying that essentially, Digg contains 90% crap.

Well, I’ll let you be the judge of that.

External Links:

How to Use Digg Like a Pro