What is this Digg thing?

Image by matterk via Flickr

Once upon a time there was this thing called television, and one of its jobs was to deliver News and information about the world into the homes and minds of the populace.  For a long time it did this job, but then came the internet and it proved to be a better way to get News out there.  The problem was that there was so much News.

One day a young entrepreneur, Kevin Rose, having nothing more than a sense of cool and some money decided that he needed to do something with his life and settled on world domination (probably not true).  He knew that there was too much news, and being in the tech media, that there was no good way to access the good technology news.  The mainstream media controlled the time on the air, and kittens, war and sex scandals rated better.  So he started Digg.com.

Digg is the epitome of a social News web service.  It started out as a technology News website, but because of its very nature of being controlled by the users, has turned into one of the best independent news aggregates on the web.  I have been using Digg for a number of years, and it tends to be my main source of news.  But when I refer to it, many haven't seen it or know what it is.  So here comes a basic run down to diggin on Digg.com.

User Controlled

If you're going to come up with a online business, start one where the users do the work for you.  The news on Digg is submitted by the users and promoted by the users and censored by the users.  Now in the beginning, most of the users were tech, following Kevin, or just found the site a great source of tech news.  But as its popularity has grown, there is an amazing cross section of users and news, giving a truckload of variety and information.

This submitting is done by finding links on the net and then submitting them to Digg.com.  The news can come from the mainstream media or some guy's blog in Australia.  The only criteria is that the Digger finds the information interesting and wants to share.

Sorting the mess

When you have an odd million people using your service, there is a little bit of variety in the news posted.  Also Digg's strength, user control, is also its downfall as it can suffer from a wash of political items during an election, and celebrity gossip when a new sex tape is dropped.  Almost makes me long for the early days of geek control where it was all tech news and benchmarks on the video cards.

The user settings has matured to cope with these problems, allowing you to customise the news the site will display for you.  Just by ticking and un-ticking, you can break down the submissions to the information you need/want.  And this is what we want, as who has time to read all the stuff that is out there?

Digg.com is a great site to have in your bookmarks, or maybe your browsers home page, as it can be used to open your eyes to the world, and as a resource for thought for the day.  Digg.com is also a example of the power of the internet, as it can give a voice to the nobody and sometimes that is the voice we need to hear.

Well, that is Digg.com, worth checking out if you haven't already.  Other sites that are also worth a look are StumbleUpon, Google Reader, reddit, and del.icio.us.


Jason Remnant

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I like AIR

Image via Wikipedia

While the focus has been on the production of new mobility hardware, there has been a couple of new software base platforms making an appearance of late.  I have commented on Adobe's AIR before, and Microsoft look to be doing things with Silverlight and Live Mesh.  Now Apple are playing with their own Sproutcore, while we were all watching their other hand with the iPhone in it.

I have been using a couple of the Adobe AIR Apps.  I'm really interested in this new crossplatform movement they represent, as it means I can be productive without having to settle for one Operating System or computing platform.

Pownce

Pownce was one of the first and if memory serves, was one of the Beta Apps for AIR.  Conceived by the Digg founder Kevin Rose, Pownce is to be the bridge between Twitter, Instant Messaging, and Social Networking.  If, like me, you hang on Kevin's every audible sound, then you would have jumped onto Pownce and found, not much.

This has developed into a neat little App and really should be the next step for the Twitter faithful, but until Twitter goes, it will be in its shadow.  Pownce's support for links, media, and files gives it better content than Twitter, though it would be interesting to see if it would handle the load.

Twirl

If you play the Twitter, Twirl is the AIR App which will cater to your addiction.  After trying the Twitter webpage for all of five minutes, I hunted around for a good stand alone Desktop App, and found Twirl.  Twirl has grown into a good replacement for the Twitter webpage, giving you almost all the functionality and more.  You can follow, unfollow, favourites, links, filter, reply, and find people, plus see those annoying pics.

It is a little bit more solid than Twitter as it doesn't crash when Twitter does.  I found Twirl better than Twitterific and the other Desktop Apps, although Twitterfox was a little leaner on the system. (Twitterfox is annoying once you have a number of browser windows open).

ReadAir

This was the program that prompted this post as it pushed AIR into making WebApps Desktop friendly.  More and more we are seeing brilliant and useful Apps being built into the web.  It seems to be better to build software into a webpage where it can get better exposure and in some ways is cheaper to roll-out.  Sites like Facebook, Google Docs, Gmail, and 280 slides show that you can do everything on a webpage. 

The battle has been getting people to move their lives onto the web.  I have moved over kicking and screaming, the main issue has been the difficulty of trusting a webpage over a "code and mortar" desktop application.  This is a problem for many of my generation and older, even if in reality these Web Apps are as strong as a Desktop App.

ReadAir is a good example of AIR's strength, as it is a Desktop App for the Google Reader.  Google Reader is a neat way of getting access to all the news you could ever need, or want.  In fact I don't think I have ever worked my way through all the headings in one sitting.  Google Reader allows you to plug in your favourite websites (Ars Technica, Digg, Techcrunch, TBL, etc.) and via the sites RSS feed, have access to article posts.

ReadAir cuts out finding a bookmark and logging in to Google Reader, and gives you an icon on the desktop and opens up an App, so no more accidental closing your web browser and losing your place.

I'm really into the AIR Apps, others I play with like Analytics Reporting Suite, Shrink-O-Matic, and eBay Desktop which give quick access and functionality to the desktop.  Soon just by adding a bunch of these tools to any platform I'll be able to function without too many full price retail programs.  Nice.


Jason Remnant

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