14 DAY TRIAL // Digg was one of the most promising sites for news and content discovery thanks to its speed and the fact that it relied on its users to weed out the garbage. But, then, Twitter came along and, all of a sudden, Digg looked like a slumbering dinosaur where things could take days before they reached the main page. Since then, the site has been looking to reinvent itself and has been adding some real-time elements into the mix. Now, it's launching a trending topics feature of sorts dubbed Digg Trends.
“Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there,” Digg said about the new feature.
The idea is to get stories moving faster, so that the ones that are likely to generate attention can get to the homepage sooner than just by using the regular process. Digg identifies stories that are getting a higher than usual activity and then posts them on top of the homepage for just ten minutes. During this time, users can vote on it if they like it and, if it gets enough diggs, it gets to be featured in the top stories.
Digg wants interesting stories to surface faster, but it doesn't want to alter the established process through which the stories get promoted, so users won't be able to see any stats that may influence their own vote. They'll be able to see how many have viewed the story, but not the number of diggs or buries it got. This is just an experiment for Digg, the feature isn't necessarily here to stay and, if it does get implemented, it may see some tweaks along the way. But it does show that Digg is very committed to bringing information faster and this could very well be a way to do that without changing the nature of the site.
