We did our blog posts on Digg.com a few weeks ago, and I wasn’t particularly enthralled with Digg. I honestly found a lot of its content underwhelming. I have since discovered Fark.com, an underground, poor man’s version of Digg, but with more entertaining (and edgy) content and a much more humorous approach. Fark has been around longer than Digg and, because of its entertaining approach, quickly developed a cult popularity. Users submit links to Drew Curtis, the owner of the site, and he sifts through them and posts the most entertaining links, complete with his humorous commentary/opinions on the content. Drew receives around 2,000 links each day, which he sifts through and narrows down. Throughout the years, Fark users (warmly referred to as “Farkers”), have developed a unique collection of vocabulary and linguistic phrases with which they comment on the posted content. Fark is its own culture, and possesses a small-to-medium-sized base of extremely loyal Farkers. Content posted to the site is commented on by Drew, tagged into a category, then torn to shreds by the Farkers. If you’re looking for a high-quality internet time waster, you’ve found it in Fark.com. The following is a list of examples of entertaining content available on Fark.com.

Man Loses License after Drunk-Driving in Toy Barbie Car
Wheelie Bin Stunt Goes Wrong
The World’s Most Expensive Ham

Our culture, for whatever reason, possesses a particular fascination with the downfall of itself. We can’t seem to get enough of peoples’ misfortune. The Smoking Gun is a website designed to bring individuals’ troubles, legal or social, into the public eye. The site hosts new legal documents, arrest records, police mugshots, evidence, eyewitness crime accounts, highly sensitive & embarrassing personal information, etc on a daily basis. Most of the site’s traffic is due to the information it provides related to celebrities. Before writing this post, I was sucked in and ended reading a 21-page document detailing all of the prosecution’s witness accounts and evidence against Ben Roethlisberger in his recent case. Away from the topic of crime, however, the site aims to release to the public basically anything that would embarrass a celebrity. Which is why I like it so much. Other notable pieces of content available on TheSmokingGun include: a large collection of massive, yet highly entertaining tour riders they’ve procured from famous performing artists, famous mugshots, and an impressive assorted list of highly embarrassing documents. I must admit, our masochistic cultural enthrallments exist for a reason and I find this site highly amusing.

Creative Commons is an organization committed to the expansion of legal sharing of creative works. Its infrastructure has basically partnered with the use of the internet to form a wealth of text and other various media that can be freely distributed and used by many. It offers a series of flexible legal licenses that can be attached to content in order to ease the legal restrictions attached to them when that content is shared and used by others. Creative Commons aims to dilute the restrictive nature of our culture by providing “institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate with culture more freely”. Large lists of works utilizing Creative Commons licenses are available online, and the content can be easily downloaded/viewed at will. Notable organizations/groups using creative commons licenses are Wikipedia, Whitehouse.gov, the Public Library of Science, Nine Inch Nails, Google, Flickr, and (surprisingly) Al Jazeera. For more information on Creative Commons, check it out for yourself!

You’d be surprised what some people are willing to do to earn $5.  Fiverr.com is a twitter-esque site that enables users to log on and post things that they’re willing to do to pocket a little bit of extra cash. Users can simply browse through these entries and take anyone up on their offers. The majority of these requests are legitimate, and the model is innovative and clever. The entries are formatted identically (“I will ___________ for $5) and are very entertaining to browse through. Given ample time, I still doubt that I’d be able to find anywhere else online where I could personally pay someone 5 bucks to revise my resume, create a custom flipbook from a video file, record a movie preview-style voiceover for my video, give me a digital makeover, etc. The flexibility is astounding the potential is limitless. Fiverr.com effectively unites unique suppliers with obscure customers. In addition to the legitimately helpful entries, there exist a handful of hilarious gems as well. The following is a list of things that people are willing to do for $5 on Fiverr.com:

I will let you sleep on my couch and watch movies with me for $5
I will sing 5 out of tune Irish songs to you for $5
I will burn a small paper effigy of your enemy for $5
I will trade you a klondike bar for $5
I will eat ramen noodles for an entire week for every meal for $5
I will talk down to you like my dad for $5
I will sell you my eternal soul for $5

Check it out for yourself.

The most brilliant online business models are almost always the simplest ones. This is especially true for Digg.com – a socially-oriented website that enables its users to share and rate content from all over the web in order to filter through the dross and discover the true gems of the web in all of their forms (articles, picture, video, etc). I had commonly seen the Digg brand dispersed throughout the web, but never actually knew what it meant until today. I checked it out and although it’s seemingly starved for comedic value (most of the entries in the “Comedy” section were only mildly laugh-worthy), there is a wealth of quality content on Digg.com that could entertain the average aimless internet junkie for hours. They’ve achieved web “gold” simply by allowing their users to pick/rate it themselves instead of spending countless hours of mindlessly browsing the web in an attempt to find the good stuff. Brilliant. I now have somewhere else to go when I can’t find any more internet to browse.