Are you sick and tired of being the last person on cam-pus to hear about the coolest, hippest, most brilliant new Web site or YouTube clip on the Internet? Fed up with being generally behind the times? Look no further than Digg.com. This social book-marking Web site is the best way to stay current on everything from up-to-the-minute election news to Paris Hilton’s most recent ex-ploits. All of Digg’s content is user-based – it works like a democra-cy. Users can “Digg” or “Bury” submitted Web sites, and the Web sites that receive the most Diggs are then promoted as the most popular of the day, week or year respectively. The advantages to this are twofold: You have the ability to voice your opinion about what you believe is newsworthy, and every Web site starts on an even keel. The Web site’s news is di-vided into different topics in-cluding entertainment, science, technology, world and business, sports and gaming. Within those main categories are sub-catego-ries. Anyone can look at the Web-site, but if you want to submit a site or Digg another one, you must create an account. When you create an account, a log is kept of what you Digg and Bury, and other members can see this activity on your profile. Once you have submitted a Web site, you can create a de-scription about it and classify it into one of the categories. After that, it’s up to other Diggers to decide if it’s truly Digg-worthy. The best way to think of Digg is that it makes “surfing the net” a whole lot easier. Rather than spending hours sifting through Web sites, deciding whether or not they’re cool, you can just go directly to the top ten websites of the day and the work is done. Digg also provides an excit-ing opportunity to raise aware-ness about current issues, ranging from environmental concerns like global warming and climate change to social problems concerning injustices within our nation and the rest of the world. Digg’s capabilities for change are apparent within the Web site itself. After Diggers made noise about a CNN debate about atheism that neglected to include an atheist on the panel, CNN changed their line-up. Within a few hours, news of the change in line-up became a top story on Digg. Because Digg is always one step ahead, tension has mounted due to the lag experienced by more popular online news sourc-es such as USA Today or even the New York Times online. Digg and other similar Web-sites seem to be on the frontier of a new age of access, even changing the way newspapers get their news. So, what do you Digg?
