Roll Your Own Digg in 15 Minutes

I mentioned in my earlier post today that Digg really didn't work for me.  I have a network and it's out there generating news and information.  I was pondering today how I might build my own social news service out of tools I already had available to me.

So, in 15 minutes I built my own Digg using my del.icio.us network and PageFlakes.

So here we have a few elements of social news (click to get a bigger image).  First, my community is based on a few key elements:  Cooperation, community, social software, and urban planning.  We have some internal keywords we use like community_indicators.

Looking at this PageFlakes page, you can see I've taken del.icio.us and assembled tags by people within my network, tags my network has identified I should read, key tags (including community_indicators) and items I've tagged to remind myself to blog about them.

Looking at the top, you can also see that I have assembled on another page a variety of "Mainstream Media" that I want to keep track-at-a-glance of.  (This includes TechCrunch, heh). 

I wanted to assemble a social news site that actually took the value of my network and created a reader just for me.  Here I have the people I respect, the topics I'm interested in, and worldly newssources that can help ensure my horizons don't become to inwardly focused.

Again, I built it in 15 minutes.  I used a tool that already has critical mass of users and no "vertical" focus - del.icio.us.   Then I married that with an organizational tool - PageFlakes.  My personal use of PageFlakes isn't important to the rest of my community, they could all use NetVibes or Google desktop or whatever.  But organizing that information is pretty essential.

This is important for people like myself who don't fall into a vertical populated enough for someone to go specifically make an application was.  Digg is too specific, Netscape is too general.  But working within my own community is just right.

 

 

Technorati tags: del.icio.us, netvibes, pageflakes, community_indicators, nancy white

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

Comments

[Dustin]

Jim,

I feel like I must be missing something here... I would think that one of the most valuable aspects of Digg (I'm not a big user either) is that the "voting" for articles only promotes articles that lots of people find interesting... If you're grabbing tags off of del.icio.us, then it would seem that it would only take one vote for any del.icio.us user to place something front-and-center on your newspaper.

While I do see how when you are grabbing things out of your "network" of friends that could be called "social news", but it feels a stretch to compare it to the social news aggregations based on the input for a large group of people.

[Jim Benson]

If I had 20,000 friends, the voting would be important to me. However, my social news service is about 250 people all working toward common goals. Their judicious use of tags, I think, is an adequate filter.

Voting is a filter necessary when there would be too many choices to deal with.

Perhaps most important up there is being able to see, in real time, arrivals of "for:" links on del.icio.us. Historically, I have received a lot more value from Ed Vielmetti's gift of links to me than I have from mass social news sites.

Having said that, this isn't a Digg replacement. I don't use Digg, but I do use Techmeme, Megite and Swamii.

Also, I could subscribe via RSS to front page on Digg or any other social news service using this.

So this tool is to create _my_ social news reader that is based on my specific network. It is giving me news that is highly relevant to me.

Digg works just fine for its membership and that's great. But many more people are not part of its membership.