Practicum 6 - Alexa

As I've used Digg and Delicious, I find myself struggling to overcome my initial thoughts for both sites. From day one, I preferred Digg. Digg made it easy to link my account with accounts I have on other social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, Digg is easy to navigate, so it's incredibly simple to sort through the pages of links and find some that are interesting. As for Delicious, I still find it a little bit frustrating to navigate. It's harder to link to friends unless you're aware that they're using Delicious already, and it's harder to browse for sites because of the user-generated tagging system. I see now that Delicious's folksonomic tagging system is just another way for users to interact with the site and to feel that they are really embedded in the participatory culture aspect of it. However, I think that it makes for inconsistent labels sometimes, and when browsing for sites that was often frustrating. It makes sense that Delicious was designed for an audience of expert hackers (the original periods that separated the name [del.icio.us] were a reference for hacking code). People who are more well versed in Internet technology probably value the ability to personalize the tags, and they probably have a better ability to navigate through these tags. However, I am still not at that expert level, and I found that Delicious was frustrating and didn't serve the function I wanted it to, which was mostly to uncover new sites. For that reason, I'm not surprised that prior to taking this course I had only heard of Digg. Digg is undoubtedly designed for a more casual user, and that's why it's more popular. Digg can appeal to both audiences, rather than just the experts who make up a small portion of Internet users. If I were to use either of these sites for leisure in the future, it would undoubtedly be Digg.