Thing 12 - Social media sites

I was feeling a little hesitant to sign up for any of the social media sites, as I feel that I need a folder just to keep track of all the things I've signed up for so far. I don't know anyone on earth who has enough time to really work with all of these Web 2.0 tools on a really regular basis, although that could be because I'm still learning how they work. I signed up for Newsvine and Digg. Newsvine seemed appropriate for me since I used to work in the news industry and enjoy reading news stories, but I'm still trying to figure out the navigation. There are a lot of boxes with headlines in them, and I'm trying to differentiate what's what. I did "seed" a couple of articles, which basically meant that I liked them and voted for them, but I didn't leave any comments and I haven't done anything to my profile. One unique thing about Newsvine is that the users can write their own columns or stories, and then if a lot of people look at them, they can get paid based on ad revenue. Not really sure how it all works, but it was a twist I hadn't seen before. That gives the users of these sites what seems like incredible power, which could be both good and bad.
Digg I didn't spend quite as much time on, and basically only opened an account so I could try and post a story to it. It was pretty easy to do, but then to find that story I actually had to try and Digg it again, and then I saw that my second Digg was a duplicate. So I think it will just take some more exploring to get familiar with these sites. I'm actually not sure how a library could really effectively use these tools; I would have to figure out their full potential more to see how that would work.