Digg users have begun calling with increased volume for the creation of a special section of the site designated for photographs and pictures. Two requests to this effect have received more than 6 and 8 thousand diggs in the past 2 weeks. It’s hard to imagine that some sort of photo section of the wildly popular news site won’t be introduced soon. I’m looking forward to it.
From item descriptions on the front page of the site that include a call for a photos section to repeated requests in comments left to photos – the desire from at least some users is increasingly visible. When the upstart blog CenterNetworks posted a petition yesterday titled Dear Kevin Rose, Please Create a Photo Section, Digg users quickly responded with thousands of diggs. Two weeks ago, a photo of a Digg error page at the URL http://digg.com/view/pictures became the second most popular item on Digg this month.
What would a photography section mean for Digg? It would likely make Digg one of the most high profile and accessible places for photos to quickly find a mass audience. If a substantial portion of Digg users take interest in a pictures section, more than they have the site’s Extreme Sports section for example, aspiring photographers could come in droves. I can only imagine that many of those photographers could sell rights to the most successful photos after gaining the approval of tens or hundreds of thousands of Digg users. A photos section could become particularly interesting.
Digg introduced major video and podcasting sections in December. While the video part of the site is relatively active, podcasts have not proven to be conducive to the Digg model. Since individual episodes of serialized podcasts can’t be listened to and voted on in any practical matter, the podcasting section of Digg has become a nearly static popularity contest. In order to provide the maximum value for Digg users, a section needs to see large numbers of submissions and churn. I expect we’ll see at least an announcement that a photos section is coming soon, perhaps at the same time OpenID support is added.
What kind of photos do people on Digg like? The following are all the photos that have received more than 1000 diggs in the last week.
Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.
Marshall,
Sneaky plug for Splashcast?
Kevin acknowledged this directly so I would be surprised if it doesn’t happen.
Also another Digger pointed out that they should add it as an Art category that would encompass more, I think this would be a good idea.
Chris, I wouldn’t call it sneaky – that player is huge and has an explicit disclosure right below it. Besides, have you noticed how there’s almost no branding on that player? What a handsome devil that thing is!
the digg photo section would seem very logical to digg’s model – it’d be an appropriate extension
Im sure Digg will listen to it’s users, but where does it end? They could create infinite amounts of categories. It could get out of control quickly.
thanks for the link marshall
btw – did you see we got 6200 diggs on our article!
Personally I think it’s a mistake for DIGG to organise it’s content by filetype.
The front page should show the most popular items no matter what format they are in. The video and image categories could still exist of course, but they shouldn’t be the main organisational mechanism.
Isn’t the type of item more important? ie. a review, article, opinion, news, comedy, commercial item, human interest, rumour etc… Many of these could be a photo, video, website or text.
Tim
http://bla.st/blog/
Awesome, dissent! That’s just what we needed Tim. Thanks.
Digg has for a long time been “anti-tagging”. The theory is that submissions would be too distributed for people to find them if you allowed anyone to use any tag to categorize their submissions.
This is unlike the philosophy of del.icio.us and bluedot.us, where users can use any tag they want.
At Blue Dot, we have users using the following tags for photography, and you can see all the most popular ones on the corresponding Blue Dot Buzz pages (complete with thumbnails):
http://bluedot....uzz/photography
http://bluedot.us/buzz/photos
http://bluedot.us/buzz/hdr
If we really believe in user-generated content, why not put users in control of a user-generated taxonomy? Blue Dot (or del.icio.us) users don’t have to go begging for a new category to be added – they just use it themselves, and the site adapts automatically.
While there is some chaos to this approach, I believe tagging systems give good feedback to users to help them “self-organize” into generally accepted popular tags.
Maybe Flickr needs a news section too
It’s not my business to think what Digg needs, but if you asked me, there’s quite a few things more useful than “a photo section”, and some are really a no brainer, like, say, stop creating 1000+ categories and just add tags.
Allen — Congrats man — 6,200 diggs!
I agree with Tim — it should be any and all content that is popular.
Rex
Photos on Digg will be exciting!
@1-Chris — Disagree; I think this added to the post, getting to see some of the photos. This is one of the first great examples of the SplashCast player I’ve seen yet.
I agree with Tim that a tech photo should get digg’d up in tech — but I also believe there’s a place for it in ‘photos’. I’d like to see all top photos that are digg’d … I’d also use tags [as suggested by RBA].
“Sneaky plug for Splashcast?”
Indeed… but apparently there’s no point in commenting about this sort of thing.
Allen, last time I saw that it has around 5k diggs
good growing!
I Agreed with Tim…though guess there will be a photo section and no doubt it will gonna be HOT!
“Sneaky plug for Splashcast?”
Marshall Kirkpatrick is this why Filmator is not being covered on TechCrunch?
Because you handle all online media articles and filter out any competition to Splashcast? Your influence on TC is clear for all to see – you cannot claim to be given TC readers ‘news’ when all your doing is using this cosy position to spam them.
For those that are interested Filmator is the only competition to Spashcast and is clearly not going to be reviewed on TC any time soon!
Thanks banglasavvy – I still can’t believe people read my stories!
“Sneaky plug for Splashcast?”
In Marshalls own words
“I also try to rock the blogosphere with breaking news and compelling analysis in order to drive traffic to our site and thus expose people to our company. That’s worked very well for us so far.”
Really?
Wow. That Splashcast thing was pretty nifty. I hope for a separate photos section, b/c I am generally not as interested in these and would like to filter them out except when I specifically want to digg photos.
I have started a similar post on digg, Calling to Google to make the “Conversations” feature in gmail optional.
Digg it up here:
http://digg.com...isten_up_Google
Whoever said “wow that splash thing was pretty nifty” needs to get out more. Using flash to show a sequence of pictures with crummy UI laid over top, like thats never been done before.
“Marshall Kirkpatrick is this why Filmator is not being covered on TechCrunch?
Because you handle all online media articles and filter out any competition to Splashcast? Your influence on TC is clear for all to see – you cannot claim to be given TC readers ‘news’ when all your doing is using this cosy position to spam them.
For those that are interested Filmator is the only competition to Spashcast and is clearly not going to be reviewed on TC any time soon!”
As I’ve said before, this constant Splashcast spam here is seriously damaging my view of TC’s unbiased “reporting”. I always thought of it as a good source for clear, unbiased tech news but as it turns out… it might well just be yet another blog, in a sea of blogs with an agenda.
That’s ashame.
datter
Maybe photosup.com will fill the gap? It’s a new digg clone but at least it will keep all of the photos in one place…
A photo-section for Digg would really great. Dunno why they didn´t create that instead of the pretty boring podcast-section.
That Splash-Cast was excellent. Cool program and I like the elevator-floor illusion.
I already established a site similar. Well, not that similar. We digg girls’ photos.
Please visit our site to check it out.
http://www.diggirl.net/