Thing #11 - Social Media Sites

The suggested list includes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and Newsvine, all of which I had a look at.  Digg, Reddit, and, for the most part, Mixx all seem to focus heavily on popular media and topics, rather than news or reporting.  For instance, the article at the top of the page for Digg was a funny picture of a goat; for Reddit, a post arguing whether dates should be written MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY; for Mixx, about Google cars driving themselves; and for Newsvine, a news report on a car bomb in Los Angeles.  While all of these sites could be good for keeping up with popular trends on the internet, I get the feeling that only Newsvine would provide that much information for trends and occurrences in the real world, as well. 

Besides that, the sites seem to go about posting content in quite different ways.  Digg's article titles link directly to the off-site locations of the information, which can help the user judge for themselves more easily how credible the article is.  Reddit, on the other hand, seems to work more as a forum, where anyone can start a topic thread, and anyone else can comment/add to it.  Mixx lets you view a short abstract of the article, as well as user comments, before providing an off-site link to the original content.  Newsvine incorporates articles and content into its own site, instead of offering off-site links, to which users can add comments as they see fit.  Considering that they do all have their own styles, and all cover different and somewhat random content, it could definitely be a good idea for a library to browse these every day to see what comes up, or offer them as recommendations to patrons, to see a random sampling of what's out there.