When I read through a magazine, I usually skim through it. I take a glance at this and that, read the bolder font here and there. When I find something catchy, then I’ll delve into the article. But even then, a lot of articles are skimmed over.

“In a recent survey, 3 out of 4 men answered that they feel vaguely uncomfortable when eating a banana in public.”

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As far as I can remember, Robb DeVore was a guy who left some meaningful and encouraging comments on my blog, and I did my best to return the same favour. Many of you probably I’ve been posting, on average, once a day for the last few days which is very abnormal for me, and I’ve been kind of lazy on leaving him his well-deserved comments.

Robb and I are both in the web-design industry (or at least part of our businesses revolve around it) and we have a certain understanding for the following areas :

• Enterpreneurship
• Time Management
• Business Ethics
• Technology, and Web Design talk
• And now, Blogging

I’d like to point out that I’m a hard person to satisfy - for me to like somebody from a business perspective, and for me to be able to praise them as intelligent and valuable people, it takes some time and effort, and Robb has definitely been on my good radars since I first exchanged a few comments and posts with him. Also, I love his designs. Yes, it’s true I came up with some good designs (not this site, I know) for my clients, but his design is simply impeccable on his blog. It’s clean, professional and simply looks amazing. I need to make the time to do that to my own blog after I get some contracts out of the way.

His insight for running a business is something that guys like me (and you) should all read into and think about. His latest series includes the “Bootstrapping Your Business” series.  He discusses leadership, attitude, ambition, decision making, and organizational skills which are critical to any businesspeople.

Other posts that I found noticeable are the following :

• Why Most Blogs Fail

• Succeeding Like the Genius

• Web Two Point Oh

Take a look at his posts - he is a valuable business coach, and you’ll find it very useful to add his RSS feed to your blog.

“The individuals benefit from the knowledge of other individuals, and as a mass, we become greater than the sum of us all!!!”

Facts :

• People, overall, are more intelligent and more informed than ever.
• One week’s worth of newspapers will give more information than the amount of information given to an average person living in Europe in the 1800’s… in a lifetime.
• 3,000 new books are published each day.
• In the last 2 years or less, there have been 17 Billion new web pages added to the WWW (World Wide Web). Between 1998 and 2005 (a 7 year period), the growth was a mere (well, mere compared to the recent growth) 8 Billion pages.
• Google indexes over 25 Billion web pages and 1.3 Billion images now (well, that statistic was released at least a few weeks or even months ago)

We has human beings are becoming more and more intelligent and that is due to the spreading of information. Scientists still say human beings, on average, use only between 10~20% of their brain capacity, and we can do more. The information highway, internet, is making it possible for us to learn a hell of a lot more than we ever could. That creates a transfer of knowledge and information, and the human society, as a collective, becomes more and more intelligent. The individuals benefit from the knowledge of other individuals, and as a mass, we become than the sum of us all!!!

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I guess it became a bit of a hobby for me to compare major websites and their functionalities in this way. Of course, I’m a guy who needs to be doing this kind of research just so that I can keep up with the trends and provide better work for my clients. The last major review I did was Facebook vs. MySpace/Nexopia etc., and today I want to compare Netscape and Digg.

Today I want to cover the basics of these two community websites.

These sites will both :

• Allow its members to submit stories, and vote them up if they think it’s a good story/news/post/whatever.
• Has categories that react to the # of votes for stories, and features them on the frontpage of the site or the category depending on the # of votes.
• Allow comments to be left on the item on the Netscape site itself.
• Allow sinking or burying of a story that people feel is not up to par.

Now, the critical comparisons :

1. Netscape features MUCH better categories. They are broader and more general, and it’s much easier for me to categorize my posts when I submit them to Netscape. On the other hand, Digg.com has categories that are MUCH TOO specified, but at the same time they don’t have too many categories so it’s painful to find the right spots for it.
2. Netscape offers a navigation bar. Some people may hate this, but I love it. When you click on “View Story” it will show you the actual site, but with the Netscape navigation bar (a black bar on the left-hand side) which allows you to browse related stories, add votes to the stories, etc. For me this allows me to do more reading while I am still able to vote the good stories, and it allows me to read on and on without having to switch between windows/tabs. It allows me to enjoy a much more fulfilling reading experience that goes from one random site to another. It’s like having StumbleUpon.com AND Digg put together!!!
3. At the top page of Netscape, they have some sort of a Javascript/Ajax tab that shows you the top stories of the top-searched tags at the time. This feature is innovative because it has nothing to do with the categories, but it only follows the tag statistics. It shows you the top-stories of the most-searched topics at that time and it is a great way to get a quick glimpse of what is happening today.
4. Ok, to be fair to Digg.com, I’ll give them one vote - they have the unique title of “Digg” which is quite brandable, and from a marketing perspective they did well. Netscape on the otherhand uses the term “Vote” which is more generic.

I Digg Netscape!

As you can see, I have the Netscape plugin installed, and i will monitor the traffic regularly.

Well, the stats are in for February, and I’ve done some things to this blog to enhance the looks and the functionality of it, as well as keep up diligently with new and informative posts.

Let’s do a quick recap of the growth in traffic :
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