Digg to Expand to Include Non-Tech Items

Posted on December 5, 2005

Digg is a website that lets readers submit and vote for stories. The more popular a story is the more it moves up in ranking and the more likely it is to be seen by other Digg users. A MediaPost article about Digg refers to this process as an "editorial collective" which is a pretty good explanation of what goes on at Digg.

Digg's editorial process is based on its thousands of readers "digging" a story--or voting that it be moved up in the rankings. The more votes a story garners, the further up in the rankings it goes, creating an editorial collective that votes on what stories users see first.
Adelson's hope is that the method will end up being faster and more reliable than both the wholly automated search engines, and the wholly people-powered sites like Slashdot--which relies on human editors to push stories to the front page. "It's incredible how fast it [Digg] is growing. I think one of the reasons why is because it revealed one very serious advantage over those older models," he said. "That is, it's much faster. If you're looking for fresh data, current data, or very dynamic data, a search engine relies on the crawling technology, an editorial board takes days to process and publish."

To date Digg has focused solely on tech-related news items which helped make it a very popular website with the tech crowd including the blogosphere. The MediaPost says Digg plans to expand out of technology into new areas like sports and business news.

Adelson said the site has now reached a "critical mass" of users that can sustain entry into categories broader than technology -- sports and business news, for example. "Whatever we choose, we've got good access to a critical mass of people," he said.

It sounds like a good move for Digg. As they expand they will be competing more and more with the social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and Furl.