Digg
Digg is one of the popular news sites that focus on presenting news reports and informative articles on science and technology. In recent times Digg has been covering a more wider base of news categories, such as entertainment and politics. The chief areas of business include blogging, social bookmarking and syndication within an editorial setup which is democratic and non-hierarchical.
Digg differs from other famous news websites in the sense that here the news articles are posted by users and not by in-house online reporters or journalists.
The articles and stories are eventually uploaded in the Digg website through a user-based ranking system. This method stands in sharp contrast to hierarchical editorial system.
Incepted by four gentlemen named Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Ron Gorodetzky and Owen Byrne late in 2004, Digg initially belonged to an experimental business entrepreneurship. The site was pretty much up and going by the end of October, 2004 and it was made public on December 5, 2004.
The site was initially proposed to be called Diggnation. This name was suggested by David Prager, a friend of Kevin Rose. But Kevin wanted the site to be known by an easier name and hence, the term 'Digg' was chosen. The fact that the users can 'dig' stories up to the front page makes this site even more endearing. The domain name dig.com, however, was already registered to another corporation. So the name digg.com was chosen.
The designing and lay out parts were done by Dan Ries. During the first phase of Digg, no advertisement charges were levied upon this domain. But later on Google AdSense was incorporated in the homepage and it increased the revenues considerably. Just after an year or so since its inception, the website was upgraded to version 2.0. No sooner was it upgraded to this more advanced version than the popularity took a real upsurge. Many new features were added and the site also became more user-friendly. This new edition was featured with a friends list and the users could dig a story without much hassle. In the earlier version the users were redirected to a 'Success' page first. Designed by the eminent Silverorange, the latest 2.0 did not have such navigational complexities.
Version 3.0 of Digg came to market on June 26, 2006. Developers concentrated on rendering a minimalistic look to this new version. It's been seen that modern day users feel comfortable with sleek and sparsely decorated web portals. The site is linked to several popular bookmarking portals. Of late, traffic has increased considerably and it has take its toll on the accessibility.
Digg has been subject to a lot of criticism from time to time. The main criticism is that the content can easily be manipulated and controlled by the users.