Random Tech Geekery and Online Webbification...

I've been doing a lot of Internet trolling lately, and finally spending more time on some sites I knew of, but never really gave a ton of my time to... and I'm starting to realize all I've been missing out on. The one thing you can never refer to the Internet as being is boring...

Digg.com is a "social bookmarking" site - and for those of us who dig a plethora of tech news, wacky net offerings, etc., it's a fantastic resource. The basic priciple is this: members (it's free to join) can add links they find interesting, and they get added to a long list. Anyone else can look at the list, and visit the posted links. If you like it, you can "digg" it, and then the diggs get tallied. Once an article gets a lot of diggs, it appears on their front page. The main page has great articles that have been "dugg," but there's lots of great links that appear in the master list... it's a fantastic concept, and they've been around a while, and have grown quite a bit. They also have a great podcast, Diggnation (hosted by former TechTV dudes Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht), where they discuss the big diggs of the week. It's growing quickly into one of my favorite podcasts. Plus, when I think about the site a lot, it makes me want to pick up my Atari...

A site I stumbled upon by accident that I am a big fan of already is PageFlakes. Using the programming laguage Ajax, it offers a really cool base for your RSS feeds, and other useful widgets that folks have developed. I now use it for my home page, and I forsee this one getting quite popular. The developers at my office have been playing with Ajax recently for our Intranet site... it allows for some really cool customization of interfaces that individual users can maintain. You set up your page elements, and folks can drag and drop the components, turn on/off different ones, etc. and the site will remember the layout for each user. PageFlakes exhibits this, and it's groovy.

Lastly for today's offering of web-surfing loveliness, check out Top 10 Sources. You'll spend hours there and on the links you'll find. You're welcome!

Another interesting tidbit... it seems I'll be getting a Mac laptop at work in the near future, in addition to my PC. I got to see some of OSX Tiger in action today (I worked on Panther for a small while last year, and I already dig some of the new features I saw) - and I have to say, I was quite impressed. I see some features there that they are supposed to have in Windows Vista (which is supposed to ship late this year supposedly) and I have to say... the geek in me is anxious to play. I know they say "Once you go Mac, you never go back..." (I know I heard something like that once...) I still don't forsee buying one for home anytime soon... but if the company's buying, I'm game.