Digg.com delivers the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet right now. The Internet is full of great stories, and Digg helps users find, read, and share the very best ones. It is a typical web2.0 website and it combines social media with social networking very well.
We have gained a clear concept of both social media and social networking, but not web2.0. So I will introduce this first.
Web 2.0 is a concept that takes the network as a platform for information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the Internet or World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.
Users on digg.com participate in social interaction.
They generate content by submit a link to Digg, to share a new story for other users on Digg.
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They give stories a digg to show their preference, and share stories for friends on facebook or tweet.
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| fig.2 |
By generating stories, digging stories, sharing stories, users change their traditional way to discover news, read news and share news. Meanwhile, the information is disseminated by these social interaction.
As we can see, digg.com will select the most popular stories and show them on the home page of digg.com., so users can always read those most interesting and talked about stories. However, there is no relationship between users of digg, they are just like strangers and contribute to digg index as a whole. To another words, users can not build a relationship on digg.com, they can just see what majority interested in and can't find those who have the same interest, what they focus on is the content rather than connection. From this aspect, digg.com shows obvious features of social media and web2.0.
To make this social media more sociable, digg.com cooperates with facebook and tweet. To facilitate the share of information on digg.com, it puts a share button below every story. Instead of building new relationship, it introduce the users' existent connection from other social network(FB and TW).Users can easily click the button and share it on their facebook or tweet.
In terms of social networking, like facebook and tweet(focus on connection), users share stories from digg to facebook or tweet, discover those who have the same interest, build and enhance their relationship.
In conclusion, information from social media helps people to discover the possibility of connection and social networking builds and enhances that connection. Stories from digg help people to find like-minded friends, facebook helps people keep relationship with these friends, new stories from digg make people find more common character, interaction on facebook deepen the relationship...The process forms a positive circle, so I think social media like digg and social networking like facebook and tweet facilitate the development of each other.
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