All about Digg

Researching one of the many segments for our humble radio programme last week, I had one of those “OMG” moments when I realised that in nearly 3 years of Tech Talk Radio, we’d never discussed the Web 2.0 phenomena Digg.

So what’s Digg?

Well it started out as an experiment by four guys in the U.S. in 2004. It’s become a landmark website of recent times … Digg is a community-based news website, lending itself to the Web 2.0 concept of user-driven content. The emphasis is on technology and science-based news, and it uses a clever bookmarking system which allows users to submit and rank stories.

You might have noticed the pervasive “Digg this!” icons at the bottom of people’s news articles, blog entries and websites. In fact I’ve added a couple to recent posts on this blog. If you think the article is interesting, just click the “Digg this!” button, and it adds a hit to Digg’s counter. Eventually, if it gets enough “Diggs”, the article will appear on Digg’s front page. Cool huh?

The essence of Digg is that you can see what other internet users are watching, reading, surfing and downloading … it’s a bit like a WWW barometer.

There’s also a weekly podcast and vidcast, made by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, who discuss the top Digg stories for the week in their own irreverant fashion.

Anyway, there’s heaps more to it than this. Just check it out, if you haven’t already: http://digg.com/

4 Cool Free Tools for Webmasters

domaintools.com

whois record, domain name, registrar and contact, indexed data, Wikipedia info, SEO

Validator.w3.org

Browsers accept Web pages and try to display them even if they’re not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.

This free validation service is available at world wide web consortium (W3C) that checks web documents in formats like html and xhtml for conformance to W3c recommendations and other standards.  It also tells you how to fix it. 

They also include a validator for css.
websiteoptimization.com

This is a web page analyzer – you enter your URL to calculate page size, composition, and download time.

The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component.

Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates best practices from HCI research and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

www.siteadvisor.com

mcafee siteadvisor – go to bottom of the page and enter your url for a safety test links – see whether anyone has reported you as spam out there.