This is not a fan post for digg. I am just comparing digg with other social bookmarking websites. If anybody feels that my comparison is no-good, you are free to do so since we have our own preferences. Well, that's my one line disclaimer.

It was a few months back that I started hearing about delicious. I wasn't sure if I wanted to check it out or not because the way the domain is spelled was too complicated and confusing. Finally one day, I opened delicious and I hated the layout and design and decided never to come back to delicious again. I started hearing some positive comments about delicious about how people find some

Delicious was second time lucky because I just loved the website with so many links. Don't ask me what changed my mind. When other people tell you that a website is good, it usually ends being good even if it is not. For the next few months I used delicious abundantly storing bookmarks and checking out popular bookmarks. Then, I was convinced that tags were the state of the art and nothing could beat it.

With delicious, I used to surf through blinklist and technorati and still I was convinced that delicious is quite delicious to my brain.

I had checked out digg a few months back but didn't think anything great about it until last month when I accidentally stepped on it following a link from a different website. I took sometime in going through the links and to my surprise, I didn't find a single link that I wasn't interested in. Everything were good links and I just started to question myself about how I missed this website all these days.

I have been using digg for a month and I think I have known enough of it so I can compare it with delicious and with reddit which is another social bookmarking website.

Delicious uses tags which the user provides and depending on the number of people who bookmark it, the link goes into the popular section. Mind you, the link is shown up on the main screen for less than 2 seconds because of plenty of links being shoved down delicious' face. People who end up going to this linked website through delicious are few, fewer than 5. So, for a particular link to become popular, multiple people have to find this link on their own and bookmark it on delicious. This is tedious and I am positive about some good links going unnoticed.

Reddit is another bookmarking website which doesn't use tags. They have a rating system, both positive and negative. So, when you submit a link, it shows up in the new section, users can look at the link and rate it positive or negative. I think this is an improvement over tags but not quite.

There are bound to be some users who just rate it negative because they want to. That way, it's difficult for a good link to get recognized. One of the downsides is that reddit doesn't have categories even which makes it so much harder to organize the bookmarks. They have a statistics page which I find it no use for.

Coming to the hot one, digg, it doesn't have tags. It's based on rating system just like reddit but it doesn't have negative rating. So, if a user doesn't like a link, he/she can't push it down the drain. When you store the link, it appears in your list, the link is automatically rated positive. So, if more people save a link (digg it), the link gets as many diggs (points) and based on how many points it gets, the link makes it to the frontpage. So, for a link to make it to frontpage, it has to be worth it and many people should digg it and only then it makes it to frontpage. So, you get the best links on the frontpage.Digg has categories in it, so when you suggest a link, you submit it in the category, and it's more organized and users can go through each category to find links. I have hardly seen any good link go unnoticed.

I find digg much superior to any of the other social bookmarking websites. But, the sad thing is digg is limited to technology related links only. If they could expand it to other areas like humor and religion, there is no stopping digg.

As I said in the beginning, this is just my opinion and if you feel that I have offended you, then stop reading this article and I wouldn't get disappointed as the post is almost over. If you have a good link, submit it to digg and it will get recognized.