Digg

From wsuwiki

1 Overview
2 A Digg Heard Around The World
3 History
4 Digg Labs
5 References

Overview

Digg is a social media website that categorizes popular websites through the use of folksonomy or tagging. The people at Digg call the outcome of their website as "democratizing digital media". This is achieved by user driven submissions through link to other websites, followed directly by other users voting to either digg or bury the respectable media post. Once the post has reached a high number of positive votes, it is promoted to the front front page of Digg.

A Digg Heard Around The World

Due to the popularity of Digg's website, many websites offer direct linking of their website to Digg. This is done for the main reason of free digital marketing. If a page on your website becomes popular on this website, you will then receive much more publicity than without this media community. The idea of offering this publicity through user engagement is developing this website into a highly profitable marketing tool for any company.

History

Digg was founded by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson and was launched in November 2004. From its humble beginnings, it is now seen as one of the largest and most popular sources of information on the Web. This team is now led by CEO Jay Adelson, who founded the billion-dollar company called Equinox. Originally it was to be called Diggnation, but the simpler name Digg was used. The name Digg stands for the voting technique used with a positive vote as a Digg and a negative vote as a Bury. The name Diggnation is now the title of Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht's weekly podcast about popular stories on Digg.

Digg Labs

Digg labs are experimental visual adaptations of all Digg activity. Currently there are 5 different sections of Digg Labs; Pics, Arc, BigSpy, Stack and Swarm. Pics tracks the activity of images on the site and categorizes them by popularity and category for easier browsing. Arc categorizes stories by the user who diggs them by category in a circular visual experience. BigSpy posts the most recent diggs on the site and the size of the font is dependent on how many diggs the story has. This gives a visual of which stories are popular and/or credible by stories that are not as popular and/or not credible. Stack is a visual adaptation of stories on digg and their bar graph by date is added to, constantly, as more and more people like the story. The stories with the highest bar on the timeline are the most popular. Swarm is another visually stunning adaptation of the current diggs on the site. It shows the stories almost if they are atoms under a microscope, and small yellow particles moving around are digg users who are "digging" the individual stories.