A hybrid mashup of social networking and user review sites, some (e.g. Digg, Reddit) are purely user-driven while others (Slashdot, Fark) rely on moderators to pick and choose the best articles. This post looks at how a few of the biggest sites work, along with some tips on how to get the most from them.

Digg

The biggest of all the social news sites, Digg, relies on its huge member pool for the constant stream of stories that populate its front pages. From IT, business, science and politics, to entertainment, sports and lifestyle stories, you’ll also find no small number of ‘comedy’ viral videos and inane forwards.

Stories are submitted and ‘Dugg’ by users alone, so it’s inevitable the top stories often lean a little too much towards top ten lists, tabloid tales and YouTube clips. But really good stories have a way of rising to the top, and members can ’shout’ a story to their friends if they like it, so if you invest the time to find like-minded users it’s won’t be long before you’ve streamlined your reading material.

Tips for beginners:

Be selective. If you want to build a useful friend list, look at users’ histories. Stick to regularly active Diggers and commenters in topics that interest you; avoid those who submit lots but don’t Digg or comment much. And spend time building your Digging history before adding people en masse – you’ll be taken more seriously if your profile meets the same criteria you’re looking for in others.

Don’t be a flagrant self-promoter  - submit and Digg a variety of websites, and don’t harass your new ‘friends’ with shouts for every story you find; good friends will watch your submissions and Digg the best ones of their own accord, and a shout tends to get more responses if the story already has a following. Be realistic – if a story has barely scraped 15 Diggs after 12 hours, accept it’s not of wide interest, save your shout for another day and move on.

Join in! If you want your favourite stories to be read, don’t simply add and spam the first 10,000 users you find. Instead get your name out there; comment on stories and moderate others’ comments; use the shout feature to hold more personal conversations about stories; and most of all – Digg!

Slashdot

The polar opposite to Digg, Slashdot takes user submissions, but relies on a team of moderators to sift through them and pick out the most informative and interesting. The focus is narrower too – mainly IT, science and politics – but if they’re your primary interests it makes for a much more powerful site than Digg’s scattergun approach.

Every selected story gets its time at the top of the front page – along with a detailed summary and often an opinion from the moderator – and every story gets heavily commented on by the site’s intense crowd. The techie focus means the stories themselves are usually accurate and detailed, and there is a primitive ‘Firehose’ of current submissions which allows users to vote stories up to the moderators’ attention.

Tips for beginners:

If you find a good quality story to submit, take the time to come up with a summary that gives a good taster of the content without giving everything away, perhaps along with a pull quote or two to add character. Put the HTML link to the story at an appropriate point in your text; if you have any related links or previous Slashdot stories, link to them where appropriate.

Check the last few days to make sure your story hasn’t already been posted, keep your headline simple and to the point, and always link to the original source as well if the story was broken elsewhere. Most importantly, don’t be put off or offended if your story is rejected; that’s the reason Slashdot’s often a better read than non-moderated sites.

Delicious

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) essentially takes your list of bookmarked sites and turns them into Digg-like democratic votes. Search Delicious for a topic and you’ll see what everyone else has bookmarked. It’s a little different to Digg in that actually taking the time to bookmark a site feels less of a throwaway thing than just clicking a button to vote, so it tends to more accurately reflect the quality of a page. That said, it can make it less likely to stumble across those genuinely different sites that Digg throws up.

StumbleUpon

Speaking of stumbling upon a site, this service does exactly that. Sign up, submit an interesting story with a brief description and it’s added to the list. Then other users simply select the topics they’re interested in and hit the ‘Stumble’ button to be directed to a randomly selected submission. If you like it you vote it up, if you don’t you vote it down, and this then influences the likelihood of other people stumbling upon it. A great-looking site and a surprisingly addictive way to while away a spare hour, as you genuinely have no idea what’s coming next.

Reddit

Although it could unkindly be described as the ugliest news site on the internet – like Digg with every bit of style stripped away – it actually has a pretty loyal and intelligent fanbase, and the stories are similar in content and tone. It works the same way, with submitted stories being voted up or down the front page, but the long list is constantly evolving, and therefore easier for new stories to break big at the top, which is something Digg is often criticised for.

Fark

Finally, Fark is a more light-hearted (or should that be mercilessly mocking?) take on the Slashdot approach, with moderators extracting the humour from any and every subject, often in the most tasteless manner possible. Basically a way for its creators to crack a joke about each story before you read it, it nevertheless offers a decent round-up of stories in a variety of topics each day. Daily news with a smirk.

You could go out and spend loads of money on a decent editing suite, but you don’t have to – there are plenty of ways of editing, playing back and sharing your video that you don’t have to spend any money on at all.

1. Shoot short clips, five to ten seconds long
There’s nothing as boring as being forced to watch tedious home movies. To spice and speed your footage up try to keep clips short and snappy. You’re never going to turn little Charlie’s first steps into Hollywood blockbuster material, but at least it’ll be a little less painful for your relatives.

2. Use image stabilisation
For the smooth, shake-free results – especially handy after a few too many Christmas whiskies – use your camcorder’s image stabilisation settings. But beware: while high end camcorders use special optical mechanisms and no quality is lost, cheaper models use electronic stabilisation, which discards information at the edges of the frame in order to achieve its effect. If this is the case you may well be better off using the image stabilisation feature in your video editing software. Many editors, such as CyberLink PowerDirector, boast this feature and offer much more control over the balance between stabilisation and quality.

3. Download Picasa 3
Picasa is a fantastic piece of software, but its talents aren’t just photographic. You can also use it to perform simple edits on videos, add titles, transitions and trim clips, then upload the results quickly and easily to a video sharing website such as YouTube or MySpace. It’s not particularly advanced, but for sheer simplicity it can’t be beaten.

4. Add titles and transitions
Adding titles not only looks good on home videos, but it can help to identify them when you’ve forgotten what’s what – and transitions can add some interest too. But don’t go mad – stick to simple fades and wipes and your clips will be easier on the eye and look much more professional too.

5. Edit your video online
You don’t have to edit video on your PC, however. Give the excellent motionbox website a whirl: it not only lets you to edit and cut your video online but also allows the upload and playback of HD video to subcribers for $29.99 per year. An added bonus is that the processing is all done by the website’s powerful servers, so editing high resolution video content won’t slow your computer to a crawl.

6. Record a voiceover commentary
With most home movies, you don’t actually need to hear the sound – adding a commentary track can really add another dimension to your home movies – even if it’s just an introductory note. Some editing software lets you record audio straight into your timeline, but not Windows Movie Maker or Picasa 3. The easiest way of doing this is to fire up the Windows sound recorder, connect a microphone and do your commentary live while playing back the video in the media player of your choice. Then you can simply import it into your video editor, trim and align as necessary.

7. Add audio effects and background music
As long as you’re not going to distribute your videos you can plagiarise musical content to your heart’s content. But you can’t use your favourite MP3s if you want others to view your video on YouTube. All is not lost, however: websites such as Sound Snap offer libraries of royalty-free effects and music so you don’t need to worry about the legals when preparing videos for public consumption.

8. Clean up your audio
Noisy background hiss and tape wind can ruin a decent home video production, but it’s quite straightforward to remove it. You’ll need to extract the audio from your video file first (use AoA Audio Exctractor) and download Audacity to edit the sound wave. Then use the noise removal tool (in the Effects mene) to identify the portion of the track that exhibits just noise, create a noise profile and apply it to the track. All you need to do next is use a basic video editor such as Windows Movie Maker to add the audio back in to your video file.

9. Use VLC for playback
If you find that, for one reason or another, Windows Media Player won’t play video files shot with your new camcorder, you could spend hours fiddling around with installing new codecs – or you could simply go and download VLC. This free media player application is small and lightweight, yet will cope with almost any video file you care to throw at it. Have a play with it and you may well find you never go back to Windows Media Player ever again.

10. Play video back on your TV
It may seem obvious, but why spend hours editing and crafting your video creation if everyone’s going to be in bed by the time you finish? The quickest way of watching your home videos is to simply plug your camera into your TV. Many camcorders – even the cheap, pocket style cameras, such as the Flip Video Ultra come with cables that allow you to do this – so don’t let them gather dust or throw them out with the rest of the Christmas wrapping – plug them into a spare output on your telly and away you go.

Tweak the settings

First things first. The iPhone’s battery isn’t its strongest point, so the priority is to get rid of any unnecessary drains. Go to Settings and change the Fetch New Data settings to a wider interval – or off completely – if you don’t need constant email updates, lower the auto-lock timer, and consider disabling Bluetooth and the GPS location services until you actually need to use them.

If you don’t generally need your phone for communication at night you should seriously consider switching on Airplane Mode, as it disconnects you from all networks – thus saving on power – but keeps the clock, alarm and all other basic functions running as normal.

Ditch the heaphones!

We’ve all sat on the train listening to someone else’s leakage, but only the cheapest headphones have this problem – and despite charging you a fortune for the phone, Apple still has the cheek to bundle such a shoddy set. Ditch them, spend a small amount on a quality pair of noise-reducing headphones (we’d recommend the £40 Sennheiser CX400s), which create a seal in your inner ear to prevent your tunes leaking to all and sundry. The added bonus is that you won’t need the volume turned up so high, so you might still have ear drums in ten years time.

Fix the camera

The camera on the iPhone isn’t that great compared to those in most of today’s smartphones, and one of its weaknesses is poor performance in low light conditions. To improve it somewhat head over to the App Store and stump up $0.99 for the Night Camera app. Now, when you press the shutter button, instead of taking the picture immediately it measures the accelerometer until it determines the stillest moment to snap, thus minimising camera shake. It won’t work miracles but for less than a quid it’s well worth grabbing.

Learn the shortcuts

It’s amazing how few people know how to really use their iPhone. They may know the little things like double-tapping on a web page to zoom the text to fit the screen; tapping the narrow bar at the top of Safari to jump straight to the address bar; or holding a finger in a text message to bring up the magnifying glass to edit more closely.

But then there are the lesser-known extras: pressing the Home (on the front) and Sleep (on the top edge) buttons together to take a screenshot; touching an image in Safari for a few seconds to bring up the option to save the file; double-pushing the Home button when the phone’s locked to bring up quick playback controls; holding down a letter while typing to bring up accented alternatives or symbols.

The general rule is simply to hold buttons down in every input screen and see what happens. The first time you auto-complete a web address with a .co.uk when you thought you only had a .com button, you’ll kick yourself for not experimenting sooner.

Download the best apps

While you can search very simply using the search bar now built in to Safari, the Google app lets you rest your fingers while you speak your search queries (even if you may have to become an American to get consistent results, thanks Google). Better still, it’ll bring you location-based results first, so finding the nearest takeaway is as easy as drunkenly slurring “curry (hic)” to no one in particular. It gives you the ability to point your search not just at the web in general but also at Google’s maps, images and shopping services – plus directly into Wikipedia, which is great for rather indiscreetly ruining pub quizzes.

Location services are everywhere in the App Store. AroundMe (right) checks your GPS position and lists the nearest bars, pubs, banks and anything else you’re likely to need when you’re out and about – and gives you map links to help you find them. Where does the same thing on a map but feels a bit more coporate, with chains like Starbucks pre-programmed into your default searches. WikiMe is similar but more left-field, listing Wikipedia entries relating to sites in your vicinity – more for tourists and trivia purposes than genuine navigation, but you’ll learn while you walk. 

The iPhone doesn’t have voice recording built in, but the free iTalk (right) application solves that. It’s a well designed dictaphone substitute which records at the touch of a big red button, and stores the results at a choice of three qualities. And once your interview’s complete, transcribe the results using EasyWriter, which gives heavy emailers a much-needed landscape-orientated keyboard. It’s a shame it doesn’t work (yet) for SMS messaging, but it’s another minor improvement to the iPhone’s interface that we’d hope Apple will one day incorporate itself.

On to entertainment, and Last.fm is the pick of the bunch for UK users. Sign in with your usual account details and access any genre of music you like. Similar recommendations follow, making it great for a commute, particularly once you’re tired of your own MP3 collection. If you’re connected by Wi-Fi you can always navigate to the BBC’s iPlayer website and stream programmes, although you can’t download them. And the iPhone can also find other entertainment for you: the Movies app (right) from Flixster uses your GPS signal to bring you locations, phone numbers and showtimes for local cinemas, along with DVD reviews and new releases.

And finally, let’s not forget that the iPhone is a very capable gaming device too. If you don’t want to pay, you should head straight for Sol Free Solitaire, with its many varieties of the card classic. You’ll also find the App Store crammed with countless versions of all the famous names, from Sudoku and Scrabble to Battleships and Monopoly – the quality varies and the ratings system doesn’t help much, so you should generally stick to freebies and apps recommended by friends if you don’t want to be disappointed.

But if stumping up a few quid doesn’t put you off, there are two must-have games. Super Monkey Ball makes the most effective use yet of the iPhone’s accelerometer to turn an old console classic into a game that feels as though it was just made for a handheld like this.

And what can we say about FieldRunners? If you’ve spent the number of hours we have fighting through any of the Flash-based Desktop Tower Defense games on the web you’ll know exactly what to expect: turrets, upgrades, waves of bad guys and goodbye to the rest of your evening.

There are plenty more out there; most are rubbish, some are good, a few are as essential as these. If you come across any you think deserve a place on this list please let us know. And above all else, enjoy your iPhone!