How Non-Voters Can Keep Up With the Rankings

Digg is a site that I am not familiar with. However, after reading the chapter in Dr. Levinson's book New New Media, I have an idea of what it is like thanks to websites such as Stumbleupon and Mashable.

I found the Ron Paul section to be pretty interesting due to the stories about Ron Paul that were "Dugg" by readers, despite the fact that he did not even win the primaries. Dr. Levinson points out the usage of Digg by people (who claim to be) 13 years or old. There is a 5 year gap of teenagers who can use the site, but are not able to vote. Dr. Levinson says there are several factors why this occurs, but most importantly it could be due to the young audience that Ron Paul targets rather than Barack Obama who targets those people between the age of 18 and 30. So rather than this occurrence of "gaming" on the website, it seems that the age difference plays a role in online politics as well.

Towards the end of the chapter, Dr. Levinson talks about the "Alexa ranking," which made me curious to see how much it has changed. As it turns out, Google is the number 1 website (which probably held that spot when this chapter was written) and Facebook has moved from number 5 to number 2. MySpace, which was ranked number 7, is now ranked number 63. And these new rankings have occurred about 2 years later than when the book was written.

Not only were "Top Sites" posted, but so were "Hot Topics." The one that I think is worth mentioning is FireFox 4, currently ranked at number 3. FireFox is one of the leading web browsers today. After experiencing some competition from Google Chrome (and let's face it, it doesn't receive any competition from Internet Explorer), FireFox is being updated with some pretty cool improvements. The official update can be download starting tomorrow. To see some of the features in this update, check out the following link from Mashable, a site similar to Digg. I can't wait for this update!
http://mashable.com/2011/03/10/firefox-4-guide/