The Dig on Digg

I’ll be the first to admit my slight obsession with Digg. I am always intrigued by new things and I rather enjoi being one of the first people to hear about late-breaking news. Often times, when I am scrolling down the front page of Digg, I see peculiar and completely uninteresting articles. Some of these articles seem so incredibly dull, that I wonder, “how in the hell did these make it to the front page?” Allow me to list some for you so that you can understand (or be completely lost as I am) by these silly articles that are “popular”:”

• Monitoring a Linux System with X11/Console/Web-Based Tools

• The Road to KDE 4: Strigi and File Information Extraction

• OLPC Sugar interface tour

• Ubuntu Edgy Eft Cheat Sheet

• EJSChart – 100% pure JavaScript Charting Solution

• ocropus – a state-of-the-art OCR for Linux – finally! (sponsored by Google)

• Cedega 6.0 released!

• Can you tell 128kbps AAC from the original? Take the test!

What you see here are some recently popular stories that made it to the front page of Digg. After seeing these, and their massive digg counts, you have to wonder… Who the fuck reads this shit?! If Network Admins and DBA’s are the ones reading this crap, then why are they getting popular during the day? Shouldn’t these people be working and securing our networks and applications? I’m nobody to talk about reading articles throughout the day, because I enjoi a good read once in a while. But the majority of stuff that I read during the day is done within 1 hours time. I don’t have time to sit around and read articles all day about some application that lets you play Windows based games on a Linux machine. I don’t give two shits about some silly Ubuntu cheat sheet or Linux tools that are web based.

When I go to Digg, I find myself ignoring the front page all together and just clicking on the categories that interest me. These stories may not be considered “popular” by Digg standards, but they sure do bring delight to my days.