5 Websites That Could Rival Digg

Digg.com is one of the Web’s most popular social media sites for people to discover, select, share and discuss content such as images, videos and newsworthy material. The website operates around a user-generated ranking system where community members are the ones with the power to decide which submissions deserve to climb to the top of the list (however many can argue that it is hardly democratic when it comes to this). Digg.com also offers an outlet for users to engage in conversation about the topics they are passionate about and to determine the value of the content found on the site. However, Digg.com is not the only website currently offering these types of services to community members. Below are five social media sites that are rising in popularity and could arguably rival Digg.com.

1. WhosYourChampion – The Internet phenomenon known as “Who’s Your Champion?” is an extension of the infamous and ever popular “Wall of Champions” that was created some time ago. According to legend, the Wall of Champions began one late summer evening in the basement of a man’s house when he stumbled upon a powerful cover photo of Ted Danson from the weekly TV Guide. The man saw something so deep in the eyes of the former bartender from “Cheers” that he was left with no choice but to take that photo and turn it into something spectacular. The original Wall of Champions, once held together by thumbtacks and Scotch tape, covered walls upon walls, and is now sweeping the Web. Since it was founded in 2006, the “Who’s Your Champion” website has become the ultimate place for fans to submit photos and videos of their favorite Champions. The founding fathers of the WhosYourChampion.com, who remain anonymous, stand behind their motto that “if you don’t know what a Champion is, you may be one!” The creators of the site also believe that users will be able to figure out the qualities a true Champion possesses just by visiting the site. Champion fanatics have the freedom to submit photos and videos of their favorite champs from a variety of categories including athletic Champions, celebrities, local Champions, “Champs of the Day” and the legendary “mustache” category. Users can then help their favorite Champions rise to the top or fall in despair through a voting and rating system, with the option of commenting on other user’s picks and interacting with the rest of the “Who’s Your Champ?” community. Users can also search for Champions or other users, explore “Champion News Links” and vote on the “Who’s Your Champion?” “Weekly Poll.”

2. Reddit – Reddit.com is another source for users to discover what is new and popular on the Web. The website gives users a chance to review links submitted by other users and vote for whether they thought the content was “hot” or “cold.” Users can click the “up arrow” to help the submission get closer to the “front page” and the “down arrow” will bring it further down. Users are free to submit interesting links for other community members to read while gaining karma and impressing their friends in the process. The theory behind Reddit.com is to “democratize” the traditional model of obtaining newsworthy material by “giving editorial control to the people who use the site” and not the ones who run it. Therefore, all of the content on the site comes from users who are rewarded for submitting “good content” and punished (by their peers) for “bad content” by a system of promotions and demotions. “Redditors” are not only presented with the newest and most popular material on the Web but all of the material on the “front page” will be a personalized page that is both filtered for quality by fellow Redditors and filtered for relevance by you!

3. Yahoo! Buzz – The mere fact that Yahoo! Buzz is an extension of Yahoo!, “the Web’s most popular starting point,” makes it an automatic Digg competitor with some serious potential. The website reveals some of the hottest and most timely content from across the Internet covering everything from politics and breaking news to entertainment, viral videos and personal blogs. All of the content found on Yahoo! Buzz is ranked according to a unique voting (or “buzzing”) system where, like Digg, users become the “editors” with the freedom to submit content , engage in conversations via commenting and “buzz” content up or down on the rankings based on relevance and importance . Buzz with higher rankings (also known as “Top Buzz”) shows up more prominently on the website and reaches this status in relation to the number of votes and comments the buzz receives, the popularity of related search terms on Yahoo! Search and the number of times users share the buzz with friends over email from Yahoo! Buzz. The top searches and stories on the site update every hour providing users a fast, simple way to keep up with their fast-paced worlds.

4. Plime –Plime.com is an editable Wiki-like news aggregator that also relies on community members to add and edit the weird and interesting links found throughout the site. Each individual user can rate any post or comment based on its value to the community, hence the philosophy behind this Digg-esque link forum that it is “controlled by everyone and no one.” Plime is also a great place for people to meet other members who share similar interests, otherwise referred to as “Plimates” in the Plime community, or a group of people commonly believed to be “very cool, ultra-attractive and extremely intellectual.” The key responsibility of each Plimate is to submit a variety of posts containing links to news stories, images and videos that are “interesting, funny or otherwise entertaining,” in which other Plimates can “upvote,” “downvote,” comment on or edit, assuming they have reached the required “karma” level. Plimates earn karma points when other users vote on their actions, adding or subtracting points based on the feedback and level the commenter is on. Higher levels give Plimates the option of editing other member’s posts as well as features of the site including categories, subcategories and color schemes with the added ability to change user’s access levels. To put it simply, the more karma you have in Plime, the more power you possess.

5. FMyLife.com – FMYLife.com provides users an often much-needed opportunity to vent their daily frustrations by speaking out about the pivotal moment that really “ruined their day.” FMyLife aims to prove that misfortunes and uncomfortable circumstances happen to everyone every day and gives people something that is fun to read and enjoyable on a daily basis. Each post on the site begins with “Today,” and ends with “FML,” allowing the user to fill in the space in between and contribute their “unfortunate experience” to a user-generated blog. FMyLife posts climb or fall down the “Top and Flop” charts according to two methods of visitor voting. Posts found on the “Top FML” list contain stories where other users agreed the event was bad enough to screw with someone’s day. The “Flop FML” list, on the other hand, contains posts about people who also had a bad experience but users in this category believed the person probably had it coming. Topics of interest, themes and categories found on the site include love, money, kids, work, health and sex, where users are encouraged to share their misfortunes with a sense of irony and self-depreciation. While this website does not contain "top news stories" as Digg does, it's substantial growth in popularity could result in a grab of some of Digg's market share.

Top 5 Non-Google Search Engines

I know Google is great, but you can't just live your life using only one search engine. There's alot of good options out there, that are just as good, maybe even better then Google. Google is great for general information, but when you want some more concrete, and reliable answers, it may be best to look elsewhere. Here are the top 5 Non-Google search engines (sans Yahoo and MSN)

1. Sweet Search

Sweet Search is a new engine provided by FindingDulcinea.com, an encylopedic guide site. You'll find that it's a lot more selective then your average search engine: For a search that might return millions on Google you'll get 500 from Sweet Search. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. All the results from Sweet Search are reliable: They are hand selected by findingDulcinea's staff to ensure that they are all high quality websites. You won't be finding any R. Kelly fansites from Kim in Wisconsin. It also doesn't hurt that Sweet Search prefaces their search results with a handful of relevant guide selections from FindD.

2. Kosmix

The great thing about this page is that it covers all the bases: Anything you search, you get the
web results, audio, video, tweets, shopping, images, conversations taking place on sites like Yahoo! Answers and Answerbag, and related searches, all on the same page. Needless to say it's extremely comprehensive, and if you're searching on a more general level you'll get more then enough information.

3. Ask.com

Ask.com's greatest feature isn't in it's web search function, but it's answer search. It has questions and answers catalogued from all kinds of sites like Yahoo! Answers, Ehow, Askville, Answerbag, and Wiki Answers. Those however, are not the only sites it is limited to. It includes really any site that the relevant question, or questions close to it, has been asked or discussed.

4. Silkwise

Where as Ask.com is an answer search, Silkwise is more of a comprehensive question database. You ask your question and in time it is answered by at least one expert. Every answer you get is nigh guaranteed to be comprehensive and highly detailed.

5. ChaCha

Chacha is a question and answer site but with a twist: You text your questions to them and the answers are texted back to you on the fly, written by real people. Unlike pages like Ask.com or Silkwise which have only specific questions answered, you can literally ask anything at ChaCha. Of course you are not going to be asking deep philosophical questions, or for a how-to on assembling a car, but for a quick fact check or just a short answer it's great. It doesn't hurt that you can look in the online database for anything that might've already been asked.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you are ever having trouble finding anything, a change of search engine might be all you need.

The 10 Best Unknown Websites

Sure we're all familiar with Wikipedia, Digg, and Bored.com. These popular websites serve as a diversion from everyday boredom by providing entertaining/interesting content. However, are the best websites the ones that are the most popular? After some extensive research, ten lesser known websites were found that rival (and even beat) some of the most popular sites on the web. Here is a list of the ten best unknown (based on Alexa rank) websites.


10. Inked Mag - This website isn't for everyone (which is why it is ranked #10), but if you are a tattoo fan, InkedMag.com is paradise. You can literally sort through thousands of the most kick ass tattoo pictures, join contests, read tattoo-related news, among other things.

9. JuicyCampus - Targeted towards college students, JuicyCampus allows students to gossip about other people or their campus while remaining anonymous. This is HIGHLY addictive if you still go to college and even if you are a recent graduate. One of the more unique unknowns that currently exist.

8. Newsvine - Newsvine is a great website to not only find the top news stories, but to also write about them. This website allows users to seed articles from various sources on the web and also create their own article. You can even earn a nice chunk of money if you have a popular column.

7. Metacritic - Once I discovered this website, I never went back to RottenTomatoes.com ever again. Metacritic has a similar concept as RottenTomatoes.com. They compile a bunch of reviews from various websites and come up with an overall average score. However, they not only do this for movies (new and old), but they have thousands of music albums, games, and TV shows. I like their scoring system a lot better than RottenTomatoes.com as well.

6. Candystand - This qualifies as the most popular of the "unknown websites". Candystand has hundreds of free games ranging from sports, puzzles, arcade, and more. Some might be turned off by the "in your face" candy sponsorships that take place, but it is easy to get over that minor turn off once you realize how great most of these games are.

5. Plime - Plime can be viewed as the Digg of offbeat news. Users are allowed to submit an "offbeat" story to a variety of categories and have other users vote them up or down. Your Plime score continues to rise as you submit more content. The benefit of this, is that the higher your Plime score is, the more likely you will end up on the homepage of Plime. I particularly like this website because of the lack of "shouting" that takes place (unlike Digg) and because of how interesting the stories are.

4. AnswersTV - Ever since the rise of YouTube, videos have been increasing in popularity on the Internet. AnswersTV has a wide selection of informational videos ranging from health, food, magic (you can actually learn magic trick secrets), and much more. These videos are updated frequently so you can always learn something new. I dare you to go on this website stay there any shorter than an hour.

3. SpliceToday - SpliceToday.com is a news websites that has articles on music, politics, pop culture, etc. Reading a SpliceToday.com article is the equivalent of reading a cross between a current news event and a short story. You really won't find journalism like this anywhere else. The writing is intellectual, humerous, thought provoking, and very entertaining.

2. QualityHealth - People might view QualityHealth as "WebMD" knock off, but in fact it offers a lot more entertainment value than it's rival website. QualityHealth allows you to find information on every type of disease imaginable, offers discounts on useful products, has a symptom checker (much like WebMD), and has one of the most interesting article selection on the web. Only on QualityHealth (at least to my knowledge) can you go from reading about breast cancer to finding an article entitled "10 Fattest States in America".

1. Finding Dulcinea – Finding Dulcinea encompasses all the positive characteristics of the best types of websites. It is entertaining, human-powered, informative, and current. Finding Dulcinea is the only website, to my knowledge, that provides extensive information on a variety of topics (much like Wikipedia) while offering top news stories. Best of all, this information is gathered by actual humans, not a robot. I can literally stay on this website for hours on end and find hundreds of entertaining pages.