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June 14, 2006

Digg v3 screenshots show aims beyond tech: will it work?

Marshall Kirkpatrick

39 comments »

Valleywag got the scoop today that a next version of the hugely popular news site Digg will include many new categories outside of technology. Whether other communities of interest and expertise will follow and fill an expanded digg space seems to be the question.

Here are the Valleywag discovered screenshots side by side with screen captures of the corresponding sections of the current design.
diggtopicsC.jpg

Above, two categories lists, the new one on the right. Categories and login are moved together to the left margin of the screen. Non-tech categories prominently displayed.

More pics and some graphs after the jump.

diggtechpicfinal.jpg

Above, new design allows stories to be viewed by popular daily, weekly, monthly or recently.

Many people are concerned that the petty banter seen on technology topics will only be worse around political news. Many have tried to create digg-clones on non-tech topics, most with little success.

Two comparisons that might be relevant, if imperfect, are the following:

Traffic at Memeorandum, before and after the tech part was given it’s own domain at techmeme.com and politics were counted separately.
diggmemeorandum.jpg

Compare traffic at the global super network of user generated content, Indymedia.org to the geeks of Digg. Here’s how one contest between politics and tech has played out to date.
diggindymedia.jpg

In other words, I question whether the technology of Digg will be taken up by people with other interests, or whether the digg style news technology is only of interest to those interested in technology.

Just for fun, here’s a pic of what Digg looked like in its first iteration - back in the dark ages of January, 2005.


Thanks Archive.org

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Brian

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:04 pm

    I think we’ll find out soon enough. Next week I’m guessing. This wasn’t that informative though. It’s like a half speculation. It’s a rhetorical question.

  2. Search Engines WEB

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:15 pm

    It is very practical for them to expand beyond Tech and Science - too many great stories have been Nixed - so other news sites poped up to fill the void

  3. Chad Poirier

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:19 pm

    Those guys on Diggnation are being knobs and never giving a solid date. I don’t blame them though. It looks like quite the transformation.

  4. Brian

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:23 pm

    I think next week is a solid date. Besides, this follows their usual quiet release M.O.

  5. Christopher Finke

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:40 pm

    So, a site where users contribute stories, headlines, and comments about tech, world news, business, and other topics, and where the traffic from said site can bring down nearly all sites that it links to… I liked it better the first time when it was called Fark.com.

  6. Dan

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:42 pm

    Its the next logical step but i aint sure the other subjects will be as popular but it will still be worth lookin at

  7. BK

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:42 pm

    Valleywag got some Digg frontpage love today. I wonder how their servers handled it

  8. David Krug

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:44 pm

    What’s with digg being out of google?

    http://www.google.com/search?h.....gle+Search

  9. Christopher Finke

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:45 pm

    So in addition to my previous comment, digg branching out beyond tech will work about a tenth well as it did in just tech. Rarely is there serious discussion in the comment sections of the stories at Digg; the comments usually consist of “awesome, digg” or “this is stupid” or “dugg to death”. Users who want to read about business or world news will not go to a site with constantly misspelled headlines and erroneous story summaries, they’ll go to CNN or BBC or a reputable news source.

  10. Ryan Wagner

    June 14th, 2006 at 5:50 pm

    David Krug,

    Digg isn’t out of Google you were just using the wrong search parameters:

    http://www.google.com/search?n.....tnG=Search

    -Ryan

  11. Don Wilson

    June 14th, 2006 at 6:18 pm

    My god, nice find Marshall.

  12. Jason Kolb

    June 14th, 2006 at 6:22 pm

    I don’t know if this is necessarily a good thing for Digg. One of the reasons I actually like the site is because it keeps me in the loop about what people *like me* (that is, techy people) think is cool. It’s not because it has tech news, I can get that from a million other places on the Web. I like the fact that sites besides just news show up in my feed–that every once in a while I’ll find a site that tells me how to hack an elevator or something. It’s because the people who use Digg are on the same wavelength as me. If they start breaking out the feeds and policing what goes on certain feeds, it’ll start to lose those random-but-cool listings that I subscribe to Digg for.

  13. Chris Jackson

    June 14th, 2006 at 6:28 pm

    What ever they do, Im sure it will be a good learning study for them and for their users.

  14. Brian

    June 14th, 2006 at 6:38 pm

    I think they should have just settled with more Tech categories. At the moment they’re very limited. Everytime I submit an article I wonder if it really fits into the category I have selected. A tag based approach might be a lot more flexible.

  15. Jordan

    June 14th, 2006 at 7:03 pm

    It’s already happening with the amount of non-tech stories that show up on Digg. What’s the worse that can happen though? They don’t get a lot of “World News” and have the same amount of tech stories? They can only expand, frankly.

  16. RBA

    June 14th, 2006 at 8:06 pm

    Expanding on other topics is only natural.
    The question is whether this move will expand the usually-geeky user base Digg gets, and certainly offering new categories is not enough. We’ll see how it plays.

  17. Jon

    June 14th, 2006 at 9:20 pm

    Just to let you–alexa rankings are really inaccurate for some types of sites.

    Since Alexa measures its traffic based on people who have the (Windows-only) Alexa toolbar, its really skewed. Digg users have been known to be obsessed with alexa rankings so it’s traffic is marked unrealistically high.

    If you go to netcraft.com’s traffic reports for example, you’ll see that slashdot.org is the 68th most trafficed site on the net while digg is 776th. Alexa on the other hand says Digg has more traffic than slashdot.

  18. Mark Devlin

    June 14th, 2006 at 9:57 pm

    Just for comparison here’s the graph from WebSearch.com (more broad base of toolbar users than Alexa):

    http://ranking.websearch.com/T.....ymedia.org

  19. Scott Meinzer

    June 14th, 2006 at 10:22 pm

    Just wanted to note that your screenshot of digg back in the day is lacking css, digg never looked like that.

    When digg launched it look alot more like this:
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi.....igg1.6.png

  20. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    June 14th, 2006 at 11:26 pm

    Scott, thanks - that’s a great thing to point out.

  21. rabble

    June 15th, 2006 at 9:14 am

    Thanks for comparing indymedia to Digg. Believe me i’ve looked at those numbers and trends for a while. We (indymedia) need to be doing something, the internet has moved on and we weren’t innovating.

    That said, we’ll be come up with something. :)

  22. digifad

    June 15th, 2006 at 10:43 am

    Can’t wait.

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    October 31st, 2006 at 1:35 pm

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