Sunday, December 13, 2009

Happy 5th Birthday to Digg

We all know what Digg is for. In today’s world if we are connected to media, Internet, blogging, news, articles or just tech savvy we need to understand what Digg is doing and what is so unique about it. We need to understand what made it take birth and what milestones it has achieved in the last five years. Let us revisit Digg and understand its core unique features.

Digg.com is a privately held website intended for people irrespective of their geographical limitations to discover and/or share any type of content they find interesting or useful picked from anywhere on the Internet. The simple process is to submit the link and a small brief of any news, picture, video etc. The published content then become public for anyone to either Digg (or vote) or Bury it thereby increasing or decreasing that content’s popularity. The popularity of Digg has encouraged many other sites to provide a Digg link on their site. That way in fact it increases that site’s popularity also where the original contents lie. 14 million stories have been submitted so far meaning almost close to three million stories a year on an average. It is astonishing. More astonishing is the way it has grown. The 4th of December every year since 2004 is celebrated as Digg.com Day.

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So in short, the concept is to dig a fresh story, re-dig an existing story or bury an existing story. The more the same story is dug keeps increasing its count and gives it a greater chance to be promoted to "most popular." Digg.com is really an open forum. Nobody recommends or imposes a story to be dug. It is purely your choice. So people are the real king here. A lot of new features have been announced around its 5th birthday. The best one is Digg 365 which means now you can check top 10 stories on digg.com for a day, a month or a year. So on any day, for a month or for a year, the most popular top 10 stories are available to everyone. There is also ‘facebook connect’ where you can connect your digg.com account with your facebook account so that whatever you submit at digg.com can be published on facebook also. Digg Stack is a real-time most popular stories stack in a span of two minutes. This is really a fantastic feature. This real-time stacking can be downloaded as a screensaver too. There is Digg Swarm where Diggers swarm around most popular stories with an option to click on the stories to read, comment, or keep. The color on a story indicates its popularity scale. Then there is bigspy where the latest submitted stories appear, with their count in red. The font size of the story submitted indicates its popularity.