iSMOblog

Ever wondered where the culture of social networking sites came from? Did you ever think what the inspiration of these websites was? Well, the answer is Digg. You don’t think I haven’t spelt the word right? Well…no mistakes here… it is actually ‘Digg’. It came into existence in November, 2004 and revolutionized the Internet use. Prior to this, the Internet was used only to extract information and advertising, but later it become the fastest ever medium to be in touch with your friends, share everything with them that you ever wanted to and more than anything else, to freely express your opinion (affirmative or negative) over an issue. The Internet today has become the voice of a true democratic country in the true sense of the term.

How it works?

The idea behind Digg was to dig stories. Digg was launched for the sole purpose of providing people a platform where they could share content from anywhere on the Internet. This could be done by submitting the respective links on this website. Then people were given the option to ‘Digg’ a particular story if they liked it, i.e. they could vote for the story. This was termed as digging. The stories which were digged the maximum then appeared on the front page. Owing to its huge popularity, ‘Digg’ later started with giving its users the option of ‘burying’ a story in case they didn’t like it i.e. they were given the option of voting negatively for a story.

Developments

‘Digg’, since its inception in 2004, has launched two new versions in 2005 and in 2006 respectively. This was done, again, due to its huge popularity. Many new features were added in the upgraded versions like having different categories for different kind of stories e.g. science, business, etc.

Criticisms

However, Digg has its own share of criticisms as well. The critics have put forth a number of points which make you actually think…yes, this site is really not that fair to its users. Critics claim that since its members have mostly all the control over its content, misleading information or wrong information is being posted many a times. Also, it has been found that all the members are not being allowed to post their stories. The accusation is that Digg gets paid for placing stories on the first page. Moreover, the stories which are not in accordance with particular members’ or communities’ views are often ‘buried’ and thus the freedom of being in a democratic country is taken away to an extent. Its users have also been heard commenting that this website also imposes censorship and that whatever negatives you say about their sponsors never gets into the public eye.

In a nutshell

Despite all the criticisms, the credit, that Digg has lead to the present day social networking, cannot be taken away from it. The concept which Digg gave birth to was something so innovative that it did lead to its competitors like Yahoo and Google launching similar things on the similar lines. Go and try out your hand at this. It might just be worth it!