Blogathon 2009: 3 killed, 14 injured. Also, kitty videos!

So this has been bugging me for a long time: Digg.com seems to have grown past the point of usefulness lately.

Digg is ostensibly a link-sharing site, where the most popular sites people are reading and voting upon are promoted to the front page. The downside to this is that popularity does not equal relevance. When we summarize what’s popular, we get this:

• Five Awesomely Stupid Infomercial Products
• 150 Dogs Found Dead in Freezers in Michigan Home
• N. Korea Publicly Executes Christian for Distributing Bible
• Stretch Limo in San Francisco FAIL
• Ubuntu to make Linux application installation idiot proof

Yeah. It ends up being some mix of scary, depressing, and generally button-pressing news, as well as silly pictures and reviews of expensive hand-held electronics. Unless you’re the sort of person who obsessively reads and up/downvotes articles on Digg all day –and I’m willing to entertain the idea that a significant number of its visitors are– most of those stories are not useful to you.

There’s also many CMSes and template engines capable of implementing a Digg clone. There’s Drigg, which is based on Drupal, Blinkk, FolkD… suffice it to say, there’s a bunch of them.

Just as others have argued that Slashdot has lost relevance as it’s grown, I think Digg has come to the same point.

Smaller, more focused community sites like Buzzfeed or Kirtsy, a straightforward Digg clone run by a group of women, are simply better positioned to communicate information to their respective target audiences.

Seriously, what’s the value in waiting for a site to aggregate pictures of baby zoo animals that you have to pick through when you can go right to the source?

Related posts:

1. Blogathon 2009 Agenda
2. Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for “gulliable”.
3. Blogathon 2009: In which Catherine supports cancer research