The latest version of the community powered news portal, Digg, was released yesterday amidst much excitement, so what's all the fuss about?
On the face of it, not a lot really. The idea is the same, and it looks almost identical. Look a little closer, however, and there are at least a few additions that could help even more people dig Digg.
For those of you not Digg savvy, first of all, let me introduce you to a website that's so full of geeks you'd think it had been around since the dawn of TCP/IP. Slashdot.org is an exceedingly nerdy news portal, to which anyone can submit links to articles and submissions. A team of editors then decide which of the hundreds of daily submissions to publish. Readers can then comment on the story, usually without reading TFA (the... flippin' article), complain that it's a duplicate story, or moan that the hilarious traffic generated from a Slashdot posting has taken the linked site's servers down.
Hopefully, most of you knew about Slashdot already, so hold that thought. Now, instead of editors publishing stories, imagine every story being posted on the site, and if users like it, they can vote for it, pushing it towards the front page of the site. And there you have the basic idea behind Digg. It's all very "Web 2.0", if I dare use the cringeworthy buzzword, making it slick to use and kind of fun too. Over the past year or so, Digg has in fact overtaken Slashdot in certain traffic metrics, which means it's flippin massive.
Until yesterday, Digg was a technology news portal, with a bit of blogging built in (this is "Web 2.0" after all - we can't miss out on blogging now, can we?) and various technology related categories. Now, however, they've added new topics altogether, including entertainment, business and world news. This opens up Digg to a bigger audience, but ultimately, it's likely to remain a geek stronghold.
So, will Digg be the source of news in the months to follow? No, it won't. No matter how many changes and tweaks you make to the system (which the Digg folks are doing, commendably,) a community driven site like Digg will never be able to be a reliable news source. The reason being users don't digg accurate content, they digg interesting stuff. So, while stories linked on Digg are often a great read, you cannot always rely on them.
That aside, we digg Digg, with its array of interesting and sometimes unexpected links, so if you've never seen it before, check it out.
