Digg launches a redesign, allowing users to prioritize content in new subject areas and track the activities of friends.Digg, the Web community that lets users vote on news items, today unveiled a site-wide redesign and expanded its coverage area beyond technology. The new site features will go live June 26.
With this third major redesign, Digg users will now be able to prioritize content in the subject areas of World and Business, Video, Entertainment, Science and Gaming.
Each of the Digg's new content categories contains several subcategories. World and Business includes Business & Finance, Politics, World News and Offbeat News; Entertainment includes Celebrity, Movies, Music and Television; Videos includes Animation, Comedy, Educational, Music, People and Gaming; Science includes Space, Environment, Health and General Sciences; Gaming includes Gaming News and Playable Web Games; and Technology includes Apple, Design, Gadgets, Hardware, Industry News, Linux/Unix, Mods, Programming, Security, Software and Tech Deals.
The company also expanded its personalization and social networking features. Digg users can now customize their site views based upon their interests and keep closer track of their friends' activities.
Digg has also made it easier for users to "bury" news stories. Once a user buries a news story, it is removed from his or her view and may be removed from its posting category, depending on how many diggs it has received.
"We believe in the power of the masses and the power of communities," Digg founder Kevin Rose said in a telephone interview. "We're giving our users more control over content filtering in more areas, which is just what they asked for."
The company has not announced a time frame for future releases. Executives said, however, that users can expect a series of smaller updates throughout July and August of 2006.
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Digg, which was founded only one and a half years ago, has achieved much publicity for its rapid growth and ability to send large amounts of traffic to other sites.
The site currently receives 8.5 million unique visitors per month and 9.5 million page views per day. Digg has about 300,000 registered users, according to the company.
Digg has also received publicity for its successful model of allowing users unfettered control over the popularity of news on the site.
While the dynamics of Digg's competitive space are not well-established, several popular sites, such as Reddit.com, Topix.net and Newsvine.com, to name just a few, share attributes of Digg's user-directed features.
Many technology observers consider Digg to mainly compete with venerable community site Slashdot and the recently re-launched netscape.com.
While the latter two sites employ some form of editorial control over stories, executives from Digg say their site does not restrict or guide user contributions.
"In the case of AOL/Time-Warner, they're using anchors to pin topics to the top of the site. We never want to have editors," Rose said.
Asked about the probability that other large companies such as Google or Yahoo might try to compete in this space, both Rose and Digg CEO Jay Adelson voiced no concern.
"It could happen," Adelson said. "I think a lot of the sites out there see user-controlled news as very powerful. But it's not simple, equipping the users with the appropriate tools. It took us one and half years to figure out how things work."
What's the most important aspect of managing the crowd?
"Transparency," Adelson said.
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