There are so many web development blogs, tips and tricks coming out every week it’s hard to get around to it all. I use Digg’s API, feeds from CSS Beauty, CSS Vault and many others going through Yahoo! Pipes and then into Google Reader. This helps me get a lot of stuff, but at the same time filter much of the stuff I don’t want out. But I still miss a few good tidbits of information out there.
Yahoo! Buzz is another story promotion site along the same vein as Digg. Yahoo promises a API soon, but their feeds already send the original story link, category and thumbnail in it. They need to add more categories, however I think the site is too general already. Its great for the person that just wants quick general news in a wide range of interests but more categories or a tagging system is needed to filter out much of the same news all around the web.
Dzone is a developer’s focused Digg site. It’s a decent site, despite it doesn’t have enough users or enough high quality data coming in. They have a huge amount of categories which can help you filter out what you want or don’t want. Personally I’d like it if they added the original story link’s to their feeds.
You might think would decrease the number of people that go to the site, but it would increase the number of people that use the site’s feeds. In return the site might become popular enough to get a higher ranking on Google; Thus, advertising revenue would increase, more people would submit stories to get better SEO, more people would login to vote stories up or down to prevent spam and better control the quality of frontpage and to make comments. But of course this is all speculation, but maybe they should just take that chance to see what happens.
Since using Digg’s API, I’ve found myself going to Digg only when there is a good story that I want to read the comments on, when I get really bored and want to see stories in the categories I’m not using the API for. Digg still gets plenty of traffic, despite the fact their API has been released for well over year. Dzone has potential to pick up where Digg left off but for now I’ll think I’ll pass it up.
