I have subscribed to feeds provided by Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon. These feeds let me know what is hot on the internet. When it comes to the number of breaking stories, Digg is much bigger than Reddit and Stumbleupon.

But there is one thing that irritates me about Digg’s feed. They don’t provide direct link to the news item being reported. Instead the RSS feed link goes to the Digg story. This means that every time I have to go through Digg to see the news item. It also means that when I share the news, people see the Digg news not the actual news item.

Reddit is smart. The main story links to Reddit, but they also provide a link in the RSS. Hence even though I can only share the Reddit link, I can directly click on the link provided inside the feed and checkout the story without additional clicks.

StumbleUpon is the best. Everything points to the original story reported.

I guess the reason for not linking directly in Digg is that they want maximum Adsense impressions. Also they seems to be looking for more pagerank via shared feed items. So looking from another perspective, they are the most clever among the lot

It would have been nice if Google Reader provided a mechanism to directly share a URL, instead of allowing only feeds to be shared.