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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
I think next week is a solid date. Besides, this follows their usual quiet release M.O.
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.
Its the next logical step but i aint sure the other subjects will be as popular but it will still be worth lookin at
Valleywag got some Digg frontpage love today. I wonder how their servers handled it
What’s with digg being out of google?
http://www.goog...G=Google+Search
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.
David Krug,
Digg isn’t out of Google you were just using the wrong search parameters:
http://www.goog...amp;btnG=Search
-Ryan
My god, nice find Marshall.
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.
What ever they do, Im sure it will be a good learning study for them and for their users.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just for comparison here’s the graph from WebSearch.com (more broad base of toolbar users than Alexa):
http://ranking....o=indymedia.org
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.w.../a9/Digg1.6.png
Scott, thanks – that’s a great thing to point out.
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.
Can’t wait.
Very nice
Archive 
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