Neomeme

Today, my roommate, upon seeing me once again cradling my Macbook in my Blue Beach Chair of Reading Blogs, Writing this Blog, and Trying to Learn Ruby and Failing (he knows it as the Blue Chair of Get Out of My Way I Want to Play FIFA on your Xbox), asked me the following question:

“What do you do on the Internet all day, anyway? I mean what else is there to do besides Facebook and AIM?”

I was flabberghasted. “B-b-b-blogs! Google News! Digg! Wikipedia! Youtube!” I stammered incredulously. ” Billions of websites and nothing to see beside Facebook?” Read more »

In another effort to combat allegations that top Digg users are abusing the system, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced that Digg will no longer rank its top users. Frankly, I don’t see how anything good can come of this. The top users will continue to be visible as dominating the front page as long as their username is associated with submissions, and other diggers can see that the same people are submitting front-page stories continuously. The exact numerical rankings are meaningless. Even worse, the removal of the rankings takes a way a key element of the Digg experience- the game, the rat race to the top, the same reason gamers will play repetitive games for hours and hours on end to get to the high score tables. The incentive of high rank is suddenly stripped away, and many top users feel robbed of the fruit of their labors. As can be expected, some of the top users are not happy. Read more »