Well, I think I found a few of the major drafts in my living room and plugged them with blankets. This is helping, but I would like to make some more coffee and get my chili started. Better press on though.
What I like about all this online tagging and bookmarking is that it contributes to the slow death of email. There is no reason to rely on our few friends who send us hit or miss funny videos and no one needs anymore plain text files forwarded to them, no matter how hilarious. Instead of that pot shot attempt and funny content, you can ride a wave of surfers to funny stuff of your choosing. I am more at ease with this than I was with technorati, I suppose because it doesn’t make any sort of claim to authority. Also, they seem to be completely used driven in that the only way something gets dugg or stumbled is if someone clicks on that icon, whereas technorati does a webcrawl to see what’s out there.
To compare these sites, I picked a term that I have some interest in, “rust belt”, to enter into each. Digg had 1 result from almost four months ago about how fat rust belt citizens are. Reddit had 1 in the last 4 months, and Newsvine was seven months outdated. Mixx had an interesting article about population size from 2 months ago, which was probably the most satisfying result. I don’t think rust belt is a particularly out there term to search for, so I sort of conclude that these sites are really for finding funny videos which a perfectly awesome reason to use the web. Also, I don’t care about how popular things are, I just care that they are funny to me. Ratings and number matter less here than on, for instance, gaming sites, where I would probably agree with some general criteria that factors into the fun or frustration of playing a certain game.
