Kudos to the Sj-r who has gone completely free and made some web 2.0 friendly improvements. I check out the news and blogs almost on a twice daily basis, so this will be a welcomed improvement. They’ve also added the ability to share stories with social news sites like: Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and Facebook.

I don’t want to knock the new improvements because I love seeing the site move more to the mainstream of the web, but I think they may have overloaded on social news sites. You say what? I’ll explain.

Digg if you do, bury if you don’t. Digg is a great news site. It’s a collection of user submitted stories that the digg community decides what’s news worthy. If a percentage of diggers find a story worthwhile then it is presented to the “front page.” The front page is what the majority of the visitors to digg.com see.

The thing about Digg is that it’s a geek site. Really.

These are some stories that are hot on digg right now:

Geek Squad Caught On Video Steaing P0rn From Customer’s Computer

Microsoft Announces 3-Year 360 Warranty Extension

AT&T Deathstar Logo Perfect Fit on iPhone [PIC]

And if you want to get really generic, these type of stories will surely make it to the front page:

Apple (including the iPhone), Wii, how the PS3 sucks, global warming, Ubuntu, Vista, cop brutality, Bush sucks, Ron Paul, Google, Iraq…ect.

Not one mention of how Blago is staying in Springfield for the special session. But that’s not to say that the sj-r.com has never made digg. Sj-r, I am going to have to say you’re out of your realm on this one.

Newsvine. I’ve been to the site before. I may even have a login but it never really impressed me.

Del.icio.us is the url that taught me how to spell ‘delicious’ correctly. I use it all the time. It’s a bookmarking site that users can bookmark a site and tag it with relative terms. This enables users to search through their links for a particular subject, as well as, the rest of the communities’ links.

Twenty-five people have bookmarked the Sj-r.com. As if it is that hard to remember.

This site is more than applicable for the sj-r. Now I can tag all the SPD stories and cross reference them if I ever get pulled over.

Reddit kind of falls in the same line with Digg. It’s owned by the same company that owns Wired the magazine. I prefer Digg over Reddit.

Facebook is an interesting choice. Now the median age of Facebook users is around 23, but the power of the site is that once an article is shared, then everyone in that user’s network will see it in their News Feed. But what’s the average age of a Sj-r surfer? Ehh 45? Not very compatible; however, I did share “SJ-R.COM – Govenor won’t testify on lottery” it precedes my YouTube clip of the “Beer Drinking Dog.”

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a web 2.0 hot-spot like Silicon Valley or San Francisco where everyone is in the “know.” I think in due time though the masses will understand that AOL is not the Internet and Timmy is not a ‘webmaster’ because he pimped out his MySpace account.

I don’t know how many comments the Sj-r is going to get from the “slow news day” guy that dig is misspelled.

Take it as you will, as I am just a guy who posts dog pics.