Advogato is a joint journaling site for developers. Its three primary features:

1. Members use a simple ranking system to reward each other. This provides a good outlet for admiration of other volunteers.
2. Diary entries are filtered and aggregated for you. Since Advogato is a pretty low-key site, sitting slightly under the radar, it’s got a good mix of developers across the entire free-o-sphere.
3. Apprentices and beyond have free reign to post articles directly to the front page. While this leads to an upredictable quality in articles, it is a great way to get word out on a topic. One article I posted—The Little Coder’s Predicament—was slashdotted and lambda’d the morning after it was posted.

Best of all, Advogato is very simple. It is the del.icio.us of social networks. However, once you’ve posted a diary entry and certified some folks, you’re done. It’s not the sort of site you can spend all day wandering through.

I’ve found a handful of Ruby people around Advogato. If you join up, give a comment herein and we’ll get you certified. It’s good to talk about Ruby in such a place. I found YAML in someone’s diary at Advogato and look what happened. I’m just sayin.