My Take on DIGG

March 24th, 2006

Many people, like myself, have upwards of 4 hours of idle time at work. What do we do with that idle time? We surf the web. There’s one site in particular that I hit every day. It used to be engadget.com until it got blocked, but now it’s digg.com. Go check it out. It has thousands of links to technology news, funny videos, geek stuff, almost everything tech related. It kicks ass… or does it?

I hate DIGG and here’s why. My inbox is FULL. Working where I work, a lot of websites are blocked. When I encounter a link on DIGG that’s blocked, what do I do? I send the link to my home address to check out later. The problem is that I hardly have time to check them out. So all these emails with links to tech stories or tutorials are sitting in my inbox unread. It’s ri-goddamn-diculous.

Someone posed the question a while back: does technology help us or make things more complicated? It’s obviously not an easy question to answer, but I have it. The answer is 42. Just kidding. The answer is “yes.” Sure technology ultimately helps us, but with each advancement come more and more challenges.

For example: I have a digital camera. I also have 36 gigabytes of pictures that I’ve taken. Some are family pictures, but the majority are fine art, experiments, and a bunch of random events that I’ve witnessed. If I shot with film I’d put the negatives in a fireproof box. Problem solved. But I don’t shoot much film, so I store all the digital images. Then I have to have a backup of those images, as well as a backup of all the documents that I need to save, mp3s, warez, etc…

So in storing things this way, on the computer, it consumes more and more time. This leaves less and less time to actually live, you know, get out of the house, go on a date with a girl, normal people stuff. There comes a point when you have to say “enough is enough.” You have to simplify some shit. Most of those images on my hard drive are shit, failed experiments, and I have no idea why I just don’t delete them.

So I’m going to simplify. I will not forward anymore DIGG links to my home email account. If it’s blocked at work, then it’s blocked at home too. I don’t care if it’s Jenna Jameson half naked giving a linux firewall tutorial, I’m not forwarding it home. Everything is going to be sorted through, consolidated, and the leftovers deleted. Period.

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