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”. Read more of this interesting and informative article by clicking here.
