Recommendations from people with similar interests can deliver interesting topics that one person may not find individually.
That ethos has helped propel social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit to great popularity. It also serves as the model for Dzone, a Digg-like recommendation site for stories of interest to developers.
Visitors to Dzone have an assortment of topics, all related to development topics, to browse through via a tag menu. Stories that have received several votes move to the front page of Dzone for all to see.
Stories range wildly in tone on Dzone, from the serious (“Venkat Subramanium takes a look at Java SE 5 Annotations. What they are, how to create them, and more importantly, how to use and not misuse them.”)
to the humorous (“Top 10 things likely to be overheard from a Klingon Programmer: 5. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.”)
to the conspiratorial (“Who are those who are benefiting from Ruby on Rails? Answer: O’Reilly Publishing, the authors Bruce Tate and Dave Thomas and a handful of consultants.”)
While users on Dzone can vote stories up and comment on them, there does not appear to be a way to mark a story as spam, duplicate, or inaccurate, as users can on Digg. Dzone did add some new functionality earlier in July, though, as co-developer Matthew Schmidt disclosed on the site’s blog:
we added the beginning of some VERY preliminary related link work at dzone – “If you liked this item, you might also like”.
Each link now shows three links that we feel are related to the link that you’re on. They usually aren’t the same each time you visit the page and it gives you a chance to see some of the other content that users have submitted that may be similar to the link you thought was interesting enough to click on.
Clicking an “Add comment” link next to a story will display those suggestions in a list titled as Schmidt noted in his post.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
