Should it appear on Digg?

The internet has evolved into a place where normal people like me can actually have a say in website content. This is especially true on sites such as YouTube, where the web page viewers submit the material to be seen, and on the social recommendation site, Digg.

Digg is a site where everyone in the Digg community can submit their favorite sites, blogs, videos... you name it. If what you submitted is something others want to look at, it can be front page of the website. The point behind the site is to let us, the web page viewers, choose what we like best and let others in on it too.

But there is a newspaper out there who has gotten it all wrong.

According to an article on Poynter Online, the Orlando Sentinel is using these types of sites to endorse their own paper. Instead of using the sites for the purpose of enlightening the community to good sites, they are simply a business benefiting by increasing traffic flow to their site.

Traffic is not the only thing newspapers and businesses benefit from by using these sites. As one blogger explains, businesses in general are taking full advantage of by using the sites as cheap, and sometimes FREE, ways to post things such as job openings!

I'm sure the creators of Digg and other networks alike did not have this in mind when bringing this to the public. Let's keep these community-based popularity sites for the community and not for the news and classifieds!

All about me

After going to school with the same class of 140 people for 13 years, I decided it was time to get away. I needed to experience new people, new places, new things.

So that’s what I did… after I graduated high school, I moved 620 miles from a small city in Pennsylvania to Knoxville, Tennessee to take on a brand new place and meet brand new people.

I never really knew what I wanted to do with my life after college, so I had a tough time deciding on a major. All I knew was that I liked people. I loved to learn everyone’s life story… where they came from, what they like. It is this reason that I chose to major in Communication Studies.

In these last three years, I have learned more things than I ever thought existed about the process of communication, and I am pleased in my choice of study. I am confident that it will be very useful in whatever job I have in the future.

I am honored to have been named the president of the University of Tennessee’s branch of the National Communication Association honor society, Lambda Pi Eta, last semester. I enjoy being involved in activities that can help me further my education.

I also spend most of my free time working as a manager in the fitness department of the Tennessee Recreational Center for Students- better known as T-Recs. It is here that I have made some great friendships that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

For any further information, please contact me at conkotz@utk.edu.

News

It's 8 o'clock am. On a weekday, you can probably find me trying to hit the silence button on my phone as my alarm rings. I reluctantly get out of bed, and the first thing I do before anything else is turn on my computer.

Once my computer is on and loaded up, I get on the internet....

Now, I am so lazy that I have my bookmark toolbar set up so that there are little icons going across the page that show my favorite sites so I can just click on them instead of typing in their URL addresses. I have a morning ritual where I go across those icons and check every page I have listed.

Click. There's the weather.

Click. There's Facebook.

After I get passed the social networks and my favorite sports teams, I click the next button and I'm at my hometown newspaper, The Morning Call. I absolutely love looking at this site because it makes me feel at home. After reading all the headlines, I click on the "Today's Photojournal" for the day and see what I'm missing out on.

Next is CNN. There I find all the national headlines and breaking news I could possibly want. And after snooping around on here for awhile, and reading all the interesting stories I see, I head to my favorite celebrity news sites.

Now, this may not be saying something good for me when I say I have two 'real' news sites and three celebrity sites, but I guess that's what keeps me least bored! Once I check out all the current gossip, I'm finally ready to start my day...