Digg.com is best known for displacing slashdot.com as the leading purveyor community-generated technology news, proving that the first mover advantage doesn’t always work on the net. On digg.com, the users submit and vote on every article; the most popular articles make it to the website’s home page.
Digg.com has expanded its coverage into five new topic categories: science, world and business news, videos, entertainment, and gaming. The new categories are currently available only to registered users. I’m glad to see the gaming differentiation into its own category because I’m not interested in it and it tended to sometimes clog up the technology category. Now I can simply avoid it.
The biggest problem that digg.com faces is that the technology category contains too much information. On a slow day, the technology category carries several hundred articles, all of which have been promoted to the home page. For a glimpse into the amount of information that passes through the system, try the Spy function which allows you to watch new articles come in in real-time.
I prefer to read digg.com through its RSS feed, and the information level is nearly overwhelming I don’t think additional categories is necessarily the answer to this, although digg.com has done an excellent job with its new category taxonomy. Digg.com’s new categories will surely have nearly as much information as the technology category. Users that prefer the native website interface can refine the selection criteria; each category is comprised of a collection of subcategories. Each of the subcategories—I’ve just realized (is this a new feature?)—has its own RSS feed, allowing for a totally customizable series of news feeds.
I’d like to see geographically local and even hyper-local digg.com sites evolve in the near future. This is one wholly sustainable large-scale publishing model for the internet.
Excuse me while I go re-configure my digg.com RSS feeds.
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