Practicum Post #1

My practicum assignment for the semester is Social Bookmarking, one of the projects under Forms of Collective Intelligence. I chose to follow the sites Reddit.com and Digg.com for the semester. Both sites are similar in the fact that registered users send links to other websites that they find entertaining, informative, enlightening, funny, or for any other reason. Other users then decide if they like the link by up-voting it on Reddit, or "digging" it on Digg. On Reddit, the links with the most up-votes appear on the homepage. On Digg, there is a sidebar showing the links with the most "diggs" for the day, but other than that the main links seem to be randomly chosen. Users can then comment on the links, something that is very important for the users, especially on Reddit.

While I have periodically visited Digg in the past for some internet entertainment, something drastic seems to have happened to it. Whereas before the most popular links would have thousands of "diggs," the most popular links now have only 400-500 "diggs." My time spent on Digg today was very uninteresting as a result. The links themselves were boring and unoriginal; several examples include "The Worst Halloween Costumes of 2010," a video of a man getting thrown from a truck and surviving, and the top link of the day, "Google announces new web format, WebP." Based on the top link, Digg could be frequented by highly computer-savy individuals, but the remainder of links do not seem to support that. The comments were also sparse on Digg - I couldn't find a single link with at least one hundred comments.

Reddit was a much more enjoyable experience than Digg. Reddit seems to be largely controlled by the registered users, resulting in a website that had more personality than Digg. The links on Reddit range from funny photographs, funny articles and comic as well as serious articles about anything ranging from science to politics. In addition, a few of the links did not link to outside websites, but were rather questions and observations posed by the users. Clinking these links essentially led me to a forum with as many as several thousand comments by other users. The other standard links typically had several hundred comments on them. The links and comments on reddit were also heavily liberal, creating a sense of a young, computer-savy liberal community