Student finds 'Digging' for news better

Some people claim to be news junkies, sports fanatics or music buffs. But me? I’m a Digg addict — someone who, in a sense, combines all these passions into one.

Marty Berman

Digg.com is a social news site where people can send in stories from the web to allow others to vote on whether the story is worth any attention. A positive vote is called a “digg,” and the more diggs a story has, the more popular the story.

Stories can come from literally anywhere on the Internet. The blog style layout allows you to see the most recent popular stories on the front page with a sidebar showing the “most dugg” stories of the day.

Digg is CNN meets Twitter. It’s people sharing the coolest stories of the day — although it isn’t limited to just news. Digg has a huge fan base of all things geeky — from Star Wars to video games while still spanning to arts and culture as popular topics, by boasting several links to photography Web sites and global newspapers.

For me, checking to see what’s new on Digg is an hourly addiction. I’m sure to find breaking news, something to think over, or simply something to laugh at each time I visit the site.

However, no Web site hegemon can go too long without a without a rival. YouTube has Dailymotion and Hulu to worry about, Google competes with several search engines such as Yahoo and Bing, while Wikipedia has academic rivals in actual encyclopedias.

Digg’s arch nemesis goes by the name of Reddit (pronounced “read-it”). This social news Web site, following in Digg’s footsteps by purposefully misspelling its name, works similarly to Digg and, unfortunately, shares too many of the same stories.

Redditors, or Reddit users, might proclaim themselves as being more intellectually inclined than those over at Digg as they can have conversation threads get deep, with no shying away from controversial issues. As a matter of fact, it’s the controversial issues that are embraced at Reddit.

Reddit lends itself to focus more on hard news stories than Digg does. Politics are important as well as social issues, but while Reddit might like to say it’s a mature version of Digg, rest assured — you’ll find just as many outrageous viral videos, photos and gags as you would on Digg.

There would be no problems if I were to tell you to check out a video on YouTube or to look for a certain article on The New York Times’ Web site, but if I were to link you there via a blog of mine, I might need to pay up. What can seem like an act of advertising to a site can also be seen as an infringement on royalties.

If Digg is making profit because it’s showing off other sites’ stories, shouldn’t those sites get a cut of the money? Or is it all free game, because all these sites are really doing is telling you where to find cool stuff?

I’d like to continue to think that social news sites like Digg act as a way for people to more easily explore the Internet and, if anything, are able to spread people to sites they might not have checked out otherwise.

These sites help uncover the best and most timely journalism, the funniest videos and the most jaw-dropping photography, and they express ideas that create conversation and thought, making the world of news networking sites continually fun to Digg through.