can you digg it?

In a society where what is considered "news" really isn't determined by the viewer, Digg is the savior.

We vote for government officials. We vote for American Idol. And thanks to Digg, we can now vote for news.

Digg is home of what its collective friend system thinks is news. Digg is a place for people to find, explore, and share different content on the web. Any website or webpage, regardless of the amount of hits, can be posted onto digg, and visitors of digg then "digg" the article or webpage, and the homepage of digg offers articles and webpages that have been "dugg" [sic] the most.

How does this relate to communication? Well, users of Digg communicate with the entire web world when they digg an article. When digging an article, the digger is shedding their opinion of something that they feel is worth reading. Users of digg also have an online community of diggers, and this equates to social networking.

Julia Layton of "how stuff works" explains how Digg works.

"Welcome to Digg.com, a user-driven news Web site that brings together hundreds of thousands of people to do the work of finding, submitting, reviewing and featuring news stories drawn from every corner of the Web."

Below is a short overview of Digg from bbc news.



Now how can 1 "digg?" It's easy, just sign up for a free account, and you are free to "digg" and vote for stories that you feel that people need to look into.

Why Digg? Well, Muhammad Saleem from Tech Crunch explains 9 reasons why the Digg story sells.

"The promise is that the site will put power in your hands. You get to decide what content is submitted to the site, and you collectively decide which submissions are important enough to be promoted to the site’s front page."

Below is an interview from 2007 where USA Today's Jefferson Graham visits Digg CEO Jay Adelson.



Digg is a personal network as well, as described above. Digg users have user profiles, and they can have Digg friends, which allows users to share interests and view each others pages and articles that they "digg" as well.

Along with being a site where Digg users have the power to determine what news is, on Digg, Digg is also emerging as a social networking tool as read in an article written by Catherine Holahan of Business Week as she discusses how Digg goes deeper with social networking.

"The intent is to make it easier for users to find others who share their passions by enabling them to form small groups of "friends" and create fuller personal profiles."

To wrap it up, Digg is a social site that enables web users like you and me to have an input of what we think is newsworthy. In a society where everything pitched to us is determined news, with Digg, we have the power to Digg something that perhaps would've never been seen by the masses, and at the same time, dwell within a website community that offers us an opportunity to see what other people Digg.

Can you Digg it?