5 Reasons Why I Want Digg for Girls

I'm a guy, and I couldn't care less about the NBA, Howard Stern, or James Bond trivia without spraining something.<p>What exactly IS "girl stuff"? The article didn't mention a single example of what a "girl link" is, except jokingly mentioning a few sexist ideas.

Hmm. As a girl, I <i>am</i> interested in stuff like the following. My issues have never been with links, but with idiotic commentary on links.<p><i>Instead, I'm stuck reading headlines like "Compressed Air Cars Coming To New Zealand" and "New maskless lithography trick may keep Moore's Law on track."</i>

I don't know how Slashdot did it, but "insightful / informative / interesting / funny" seem to be exactly the four qualities that can make a piece of text good. If you either added a bucket or took a bucket away, the signal to noise ratio would go down. At least from my perspective. But maybe women have different buckets, or have a different optimal blend of how much should fall into each bucket.<p>edit: My proposed mechanism for this is that the pattern matching in women's brains is less strict than the pattern matching in men's brains (i.e. women see patterns more easily), which for women blurs the line between interesting and insightful. But I don't actually have any credible evidence to support this, so take it for what it's worth.

Forget girls; Digg ostracizes anyone who isn't a Male-Liberal-American-ObamaSupporting-AppleLoving-WebDesigner.

Reddit had a spin-off called lipstick.com, which has now become <a href="http://www.weheartgossip.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.weheartgossip.com/</a><p>There's the 'OMG' reddit alien, replete with blond hair and lipstick: <a href="http://thumbs.reddit.com/t5_2qh3n_29.png?v=4v4n810ku3an8yqud5egg2hzlsckf9jp0ztw" rel="nofollow">http://thumbs.reddit.com/t5_2qh3n_29.png?v=4v4n810ku3an8yqud...</a><p>Sadly, it falls into the category of 'what advertisers/editors think women want in a social networking site.' Based on my own at-work experience with somewhat/fairly geeky girls (not coders), tmz.com and perezhilton.com already accomplish what lipstick/weheartgossip seek to do.

There IS a digg for girls: PrettySocial ;-)<p><a href="http://www.prettysocial.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.prettysocial.net/</a><p>Seriously though, there are several such sites with different target groups:<p>PrettySocial (ours): for young women, focus is on fashion, beauty, health etc. with lots of pretty pictures!<p>Kirtsy: for mothers and older women, coverage is more general<p>Boudica: it's a new site, the stories are a little random, but looks promising

<i>...the site has a core userbase of boys who spend hours each day posting stories and Digging stories posted by their friends.</i><p>The problem here is that a small core group of users is able to exert undue influence on the site. If the ranking system on Digg were better balanced, its featured stories would better represent the interests of its broader (and presumably more gender-balanced) user base.

You can take the source code for hacker news, change the css around, and buy a fitting domain name.

Top Headlines from Digg right now:<p>Oregon Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian E-Mail Scam First Look at Johnny Depp- Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland New honeycomb tire is 'bulletproof' If TV Shows Had Truthful Titles Phil Gramm Has No Remorse Over Destroying the US Economy Chinese pirates crack Blu-ray DRM, sell pirated HD discs Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners 30 Rare &#38; Expensive Gamecube Games New MythTV Interface Preview Mark Cuban charged with insider trading.<p>Anyone see a male bias there? The Johnny Depp article would actually tip the scales to the female side in my opinion.

There's a web app (forget what it's called) that analyses the writing on a web page and decides whether a man or woman wrote it.<p>So something like this could be largely automated, start off with a collection of links then categorise them according to the text on the page and/or the writing of the person linking to them.

There aren't even 5 points in the article. Just the same complaint "I don't like Digg content" 5 times. She gives examples of what she doesn't like, but at no point offers examples of the kinds of things she likes. Also, I'm honestly not sure if the core group of women who would power a site like digg would be very different than the guys on digg. There's roughly only 1% of digg users submitting content. Would the 1% of women submit Martha Stewart or Steve Jobs? I suspect the difference between the über geek girl isn't to far from über geek guy.

<a href="http://kirsty.com" rel="nofollow">http://kirsty.com</a> (used to be called something else, I forget). They talked about that site when I took a tour of the Houston Technology Center.

Of COURSE there is a digg for girls. In fact, of course there are 5. It's disheartening to realize how much has already been completely done to death.

There <i>is</i> Digg for girls:<p>boudica.com

Here's another: <a href="http://www.kirtsy.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kirtsy.com/</a>

Try www.lipstick.com.

There are a few -- try <a href="http://www.kirtsy.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kirtsy.com/</a>

kirtsy.com