Find and Share the Best of the Internet with Digg

If you want to see what stories, videos and images are hot on the Internet right now, head over to Digg.com. If you want to chime in with your own opinions, get surfing recommendations or access a whole new online community, then create a Digg.com account.

Digg.com is a free web site that lets its Internet community rank pages on the Internet. As account holders find web pages with articles, blog posts, videos or pictures that they like, they can “digg” the page. The more diggs a page gets, the higher its popularity rank. After enough diggs, a page can earn its place on the “popular” page.

You don’t have to create a user account to see what’s been most popular in the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or 365 days, making it a great place to start if you have some free time to browse the Internet. However, when you create a Digg account, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute to the community and enhance your experience with lots of features and options.

Digg It

Get the power to “digg” articles, blog entries, videos and images with a Digg account. You can show your appreciation for great Internet content by clicking “Submit New” on the Digg.com homepage, using a Digg toolbar that you’ve added to your browser, or finding and clicking a Digg button next to content you like. Noobie.com includes these buttons next to its blog posts, but remember, you have to have a Digg account before you can “vote.”

Vote It

In addition to digging Internet content, you can publicly share your opinion about other pages that have been dugg (no that’s not a typo) by other people. Recently, the web content with the most diggs in the last 24 hours was an article about Arnold Schwarzenegger encouraging the legalization of pot. You might have something to say about that. If so, expand your view of that digg entry by clicking “More” or “Comments” then enter your text-only comment in the box provided. You also can give thumbs up or down to comments left by other people.

Bury It

Of course, if you click the link to read Arnold Schwarzenegger’s opinion and find out it is from an interview he did in 1969, then you may not give the article much credence. In fact, you may want to “bury” the story to try and push down its popularity. Common reasons for burying a story include misleading headlines, outdated content and unreliable sources.

Share It

Digging an article is a fun way to contribute to the broader Internet community, but sometimes you want to make sure an individual person sees something that you found particularly interesting or may be of interest to them. This is where “Share” comes in handy. When you click the word “Share” directly below each Digg entry, a pop up window will give you the option to “Shout It” out to a Digg friend, send it in an email or add it to your own blog. With the email option, you can even avoid filling out the Digg email form by click an icon that matches that of your mail service and a new outgoing email will be launched and preloaded with the page link.

Filter It

There is a lot of content on the Internet, and just because something is popular doesn’t necessarily mean it interests you. Since all content on Digg is categorized into areas of interest, you can easily filter out what doesn’t interest you. For example, the Schwarzenegger article was filed as “political news.” Maybe politics isn’t your thing. If so, you can customize your account and remove all political news from your Digg feed. Love sports but have no interest in tennis? Filter out articles about tennis, but keep reading about other sports.

Digg.com takes filtering one step further by letting you eliminate entire media types from your feed. Content gets filed as one of three media categories: news, video and images. You can select one or all of these content types according to your personal preference.

Profile It

Much like Facebook, you’ll have a profile or “wall” that displays information about your diggs, comments and submissions. Your privacy settings help you control who sees your profile, and, if you prefer, you can limit viewing to only those people with whom you are mutual friends. Profiles are a great way to see what others who share your interests are digging.

Find It

For those days when one topic dominates the Digg.com home page (i.e. Election Day or Super Bowl Sunday), or on any day when you find you’re not marching to the same beat as the greater Internet community, try looking for reading recommendations in the “Upcoming” section. The more times you digg content, the better your recommendations will get. Even though Upcoming content may only have a few diggs these recommendations help give it a fair chance at popularity.

Next time you want to find a good article on a topic, for example maybe you want to decide if you should buy a digital camera for your child, try a Digg search instead of a Google search. You’ll quickly find popular content, and you may learn even more about the topic by reading posted comments. Be sure to note that you can organize search results into “Best Match,” “Most Dugg,” and “Newest First.”

Digging a Grave?

When content on Digg.com attracts a lot of attention, it can wreak havoc on host web sites. Pages that become so popular that they float to the top of the “Popular” page may get so much traffic that the host site crashes and experiences an outage. To remedy this, content owners have to create mirrors of the original page so that it can automatically redirect viewers to another URL.

Digg.com has also faced its own challenges. In an effort to make the site an honest representation of articles that earn their popularity, Digg.com has had to implement some stop gap measures. For example, when you submit a comment or digg new content, you’ll need to enter a CAPTCHA, a series of slightly disguised letters and numbers to authenticate that you are human. This prevents savvy programmers from writing scripts that will automatically digg an article multiple times.

So, Digg.com primarily appeals to two different kinds of people: Those who find interesting Internet content while browsing, doing research or reading daily online news and can’t wait to share it, or their opinion about it; and those who want to keep their finger on the pulse of public opinions. Chances are good that if you try Digg.com you will really, well, dig it!