I have been thinking about using some other tool to capture news content which dont quite make its way into slashdot and boingboing. Metafiter is one which Tom uses religiously but I dont quite like the old style of web product it is. Del.icio.us popular is good, but the content tends not to be totally news. Sometimes you get the links related to the news, instead of the actual news. This also applies to technorati popular.
So I'm testing out Digg which has a slashdot type model but allows for a much more longtail approch via friend aggregation as well as the whole digg nation. Talking of which, there is a show hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albright called Digg Nation where they take the top few stories from a week on digg and simply talk about it. Its kinda of slashdot review but with comments turned on. The show comes in audio and video podcast forms and I have to give huge kudos to Jon for making there feeds compatable with a RSS TV setup. Do check it out if you have a Azureus with RSS automation type setup. But back to Digg Nation for a moment. Currently Digg Nation only deals with the most digged/popular news. But theres nothing stopping someone doing a show about the most digged/popular content between certain groups of friends or a certain category. If they adopted a tagging option too, it would be endless.
For now digg is getting the thumbs up for me. I know I would love to see digg move away from the website. What I mean is tools and applications which mean I dont need to log into digg to do everything. At the moment you can get RSS feeds for pretty much anything in Digg, but it woud be great to see APIs for posting and digging news. Maybe directly in the RSS reader via a RESTful url like how a trackback ping works. So you can see what being digged and dig it by simply clicking a link at the bottom of the entry.
