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Digg is a community-based popularity website...a place for you to search and discover content across the web and then participate by sharing and dicussing news, videos and podcasts that appeal to you.
News stories and websites are submitted by people like you and me, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.
History of Digg:
Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. All currently play an active role in the management of the site. The site launched to the world on December 5th 2004. Kevin Rose's friend, David Prager, originally wanted to call the site “Diggnation”, but Kevin wanted a simpler name. He chose the name "Digg", because users are able to "dig" stories, out of those submitted, up to the front page, which obviously would get more readership from other users. The site was called “Digg” instead of “Dig” because the domain name “dig.com” was previously registered.
“Diggnation” would eventually be used as the title of Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht's weekly podcast. The original design was free of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Ries. As Digg became more popular, Google AdSense was added to the website. In July 2005, the site was updated to "Version 2.0". The new "version" featured a friends list, the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a "success" page, and a new interface designed by web design company, Silverorange. On Monday June 26, 2006 version 3 of Digg was released with specific categories for Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming as well as a View All section where all categories are merged.
Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden increase of traffic to the "dugg" website. This is referred to by some Digg users as the "Digg effect" and by some others as the site being "dugg to death". However, in many cases stories are linked simultaneously on several popular bookmarking sites. In such cases, the impact of the "digg effect" is difficult to isolate and assess. Wordpress is especially hated among diggers for its frequency to crash under the increased traffic. On August 27, 2007 Digg altered their main interface.
Functionality of Digg:
As a reader, you can view all of the stories that have been submitted by fellow users in the "digg/News/Upcoming" section of the site. Once a story has received enough "diggs", it appears on Digg's front page. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or if enough users report a problem with the submission, the story will remain in the "digg all" area, where it may eventually be removed.
Articles are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for you to comment on the story. All content and access to the site is free, but registration is required for certain capabilities, such as promoting ("digging") stories, submitting stories and commenting on stories. Digg also allows for stories to be posted to a user's blog automatically when he or she diggs a story.
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