If you aren’t really Web 2.0 savvy, and haven’t a clue what social bookmarking is, in my opinion the best example is Digg.com.

I use Digg regularly, and often find a lot of interesting stories there that I would probably never find otherwise. The principle involved is quite simple - users submit stories, other users vote on them (or “digg” them) and as they receive votes, they go up in rank, finally making it to the front page of the site, where they tend to grow more rapidly in popularity. The idea is that the most interesting stories to the user community rise to the top.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and wondering if there’s a way to carve this out in such a way that it serves the online Catholic community. I’m concerned, however, that the community may be too small, the focus may be too niche, and that the interaction could be less than stellar.

Case in point: Pickafig.com, which came out roughly at the exact moment I was bouncing the idea off of a couple of people on whether it would be worth doing a Catholic version of Digg. My take? It’s not an attractive site - the layout is cluttered, the design is blah, and every story gets like one or two votes. It’s also really, really narrow in its focus. I love Catholic stuff. I read it, I write about it, but I want more than that. I want a comprehensive look at life through a lens that incorporates Catholicism, political conservatism, and the like, but doesn’t filter out humor, movies, music or whatever other topics I feel like talking about.

Is there a way to do it better than Pickafig? I think so, but I’m just not quite there yet. My feeling is that for social bookmarking to work, you need a heavy emphasis on the “social” part, which requires an appeal to a sufficiently large group of people.

Maybe making something like this explicitly Catholic is going too narrow. I just see a wide open gap for Catholic Media 2.0 - there are lots of opportunities to branch out, and they needn’t all be explicitly Catholic or preachy. They just need to be the kind of place where a pro-life story or an article about Mass don’t get buried because the teeming mass of users are all atheistic anti-Catholic doobie-lovin’ fools.

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