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bLink 5

Can you Digg it?

Thom Wong 8 Dec 2005TheTyee.ca

Thom Wong writes regularly about music for The Tyee. He has also been a teacher and contract specialist. With eight years of education and three bachelor degree, Thom focuses mostly on marketing writing.
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Diggnation

The trouble with most podcasts is they, well, suck. Most sound like a badly produced radio show, the kind the radio club in high school would have made. (I was not a member of the radio club. Seriously. I wasn't.)

Diggnation solves this problem by sounding nothing like the radio. Instead, you get two people laughing at their own jokes, drinking beer and generally goofing off.

What makes the show enjoyable and so damn listenable (that must be the first time someone's used listenable and profanity in the same sentence - take that Shakespeare!) is 1) the affability of the hosts, and 2) the content.

Everything on the show is taken from Digg.com, "a social bookmarking and technology website." I'm not entirely sure what that means, but basically, the site is made up of links to tidbits of info (like cases where the online, user-written encyclopedia Wikipedia corrects the weighty Encyclopedia Britannica, or like the origins of the first handheld gaming virus).

"With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do." Readers submit a link and write a brief description of it. Then other readers vote on how interesting each piece of information is. The ones with the most "diggs" stay on the site and in ranking.

As with all online content that's run by the inmates, the descriptions can be ungrammatical (case in point: "Surprising how popular most of these foods are geek friendly"), filled with spelling errors, and downright incomprehensible (case in point: "Can be installed in any PC with an open 5.25-inch half-height drive bay. +Intel 80321 XScale CPU, clocked at 600 MHz"). But take the time to wade through these duds and you might find some quality information.

Thom Wong is a law student who spends an unreasonable amount of time online. His 40 bLinks column runs every Monday and Thursday on The Tyee. What's he all about? Click here.

For previous 40 bLinks, click here. [Tyee]

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