My "Discovery Page"

I have always started the web with MyYahoo, at least since MyYahoo was launced in the mid 90s.

I’ve got my "daily reads" there now via RSS and I still grab a fair bit of news there and of course the weather and my stocks.  So I don’t think I am going to leave MyYahoo, but there is one thing I am absolutely going to do and that is put at least one and possibly several "discovery pages" right at the top of MyYahoo and start every morning with them.

Discovery pages are web services that showcase the most interesting stuff on the web right now.  There are three and a half that I am considering.  I will describe them and then I’ll ask for suggestions of others from the readers.

First, the "half".  Memeorandum is a great service.  Currently you can choose two views, tech and politics.  I visit the tech page at least once a day and possibly many more times.  I don’t know whether to call Memeorandum a "discovery page" or not because its really very narrow and you don’t see stuff about completely random things.  The blogs it culls from are a tight set and it tends to generate "group think" which I am not a fan of when I want discovery.  So while Memorandum is a must read for me every day, I think I’ll leave it out of my "discovery page" list.

That leaves three candidates.

Delicious’ Popular Page – The grandaddy of the "discovery pages".  And a huge part of delicious’ popularity.  Though I find the stories often a bit too techy for my taste, the ability to post/copy to my delicious account is a huge plus. And filtering the popular page by tag is a great feature that they ought to make easier over time.

Digg – Along with delicious, Digg is the current favorite of the digerati.  One look at this Alexa chart shows how these two services have grown in lockstep over the past six months.  Digg has a "cleaner interface" and uses votes/diggs to determine what’s interesting to the users.  I have used Digg a lot over the past year, but haven’t completely warmed up to it and its not an every day experience for me, at least yet.

Reddit – Considered by many to be a Digg clone, Reddit is interesting to me on several levels.  First the user interface is more like delicious than digg and frankly I am used to that and prefer it.  Second it uses the votes that each user makes to build a personalized version of Reddit over time for each user. I like that idea in principal and am going to see how it works for me.

My plan is to put at least one and possibly several of these "discovery pages" at the top of MyYahoo and start my day with them.  Right now I may go with all three of these and possibly whittle it down to one or two over time.

If you have another one I should consider, please let me know in the comments and I will check it out.

#VC & Technology