Why digg works

Every story you Digg gets saved to your account for later viewing, so you end up with a running list of everything you've ever Dugg. The more Diggs a story gets, the better its chances of making it to the homepage. Digg also has tabs that let you filter feeds into news stories, videos, images and podcasts.

You can even customize the categories that show up in your Digg view. Interested in the tech industry, but don't give a fig about motorsports? No problem. Just click a few check boxes and Digg will filter your stories so that you get exactly what you want. If you discover a story you find particularly interesting and have something to add or would like to discuss it with other Digg users, just click the "comments" link beneath the story description.

You can add your own comment at the bottom of the comments page. As a Digg user, your help is appreciated in reporting duplicate stories not allowed , dead links, incorrect stories, oldness, lameness and spam by clicking the corresponding link in the "problem" drop-down list below each story description. When a story gets enough reports, or "buries," it disappears from the Digg queue and only appears in search results and user profiles. Finally, you can post a story to the Digg queue yourself and hope other users find it interesting enough to Digg it straight to the front page.

It's actually a lot of fun to see if your story makes it. All you need to do is click "Submit a Story" on the upper right-hand side of the homepage, do a keyword or URL search and, if it appears your story hasn't been submitted yet, provide a title, a link and a short description of the story you're posting.

It'll either get enough Diggs to move to the homepage or eventually disappear if it doesn't get enough Diggs or it gets reported by multiple users.

In the next section, we'll look at special Digg features. We've covered most of the basics, but there's more you can do with Digg.

It's kind of an all-in-one news site, blog feeder and "social bookmarking" hub. Some of the additional features you can use at Digg include:. The Digg Labs hosts applications that use Digg in unique ways, such as tracking the use of images across Digg or using different views to display stories.

For example, the BigSpy application displays Digg stories using fonts of different sizes -- larger fonts indicate stories that have received more Diggs.

There's a lot happening on the user end of the Digg Web site. On the surface, it's a voluntary group effort that consistently produces a Digg homepage worth checking out -- a brilliant business strategy if you consider how much it would cost to pay people to perform the same jobs. Under the surface, Digg has 75 employees with plans to double this number by the end of and hundreds of servers.

In the next section, we'll check out some of what goes on the behind the scenes to make Digg work. Digg isn't just a news Web site.

The Diggnation podcast reports on the most popular Digg submissions of the week along with other Digg-related news you won't find anywhere else.

See Rev3: diggnation to learn more and subscribe. For a Web site that receives more than million page views a month May , Digg's technology framework is pretty streamlined. As with any proprietary system, Digg's technical department doesn't just put it all out there for everyone to copycat.

But there are bits and pieces to be gleaned. It allows multiple languages to converse over a system architecture with minimal translation hold-ups. In the Diggnation podcast recorded on June 14, , Kevin Rose estimated the total number of servers in the area of A post in the Digg technical blog stated that the company has between 1. According to the post, no one at Digg really knows how many servers the company actually has [source: Digg ]. Digg actually doesn't have to store that much since it deals almost exclusively in text, but Adelson reports that the current setup is infinitely scalable.

In a Mad Penguin interview in December , Adelson says that Digg is "doubling the infrastructure every month to keep up with the demand. Within this system, users submit and Digg stories and utilize all of the other features available on Digg. Digg doesn't use any cookies , only server-side storage, so all of your user data past Diggs, friends, comments, etc. You need to actually log in when you get to the site, which in practice may act as an initial security measure to ensure user validity for each visit.

There are a number of legitimacy checks, which Digg calls " karma checks ," built into the system at different points:. There is no censorship of submissions beyond letting a user turn on a profanity filter that blocks curse words. And Digg manages "buries" the same way it manages everything else -- with a proprietary algorithm. The system runs a "de-promotion algorithm" that determines when a reported story is ready to disappear from the main site pages.

All of this sounds very democratic and forward-thinking, with Digg moving us further down the path of the populist Web that turns regular Joes into entrepreneurs , reporters, editors, stock traders and encyclopedia contributors. But a bit of a hubbub in mid called Digg's utterly user-driven nature into question -- at least in the minds of a select and verbal few. In the next section, we'll look into the user response to Digg.

This more than doubled the amount of money raised by Digg since Kevin Rose founded the company in [source: Rocky Mountain News ].

People race to be the first to post a great news story on Digg; Digg routinely features "diamond in the rough" stories that lead to the discovery of a little-known blogger who's doing quality work; the site's users, for the most part, seem to be genuinely and selflessly interested in promoting the best stories and burying the worst. In theory, the user-driven nature of the site creates a news venue that's difficult to corrupt, at least by large corporations or over-zealous editors.

Of course, some would disagree, especially about that last point -- the presence vs. In any Web-based community, there are going to be complaints. In Digg's case, the biggest one for a long time was about the article comments, which are often just rude or silly, not thought-provoking or conversation-starting. But in the typical fashion, as the Web site has grown, concerns regarding the potential for abuse have grown with it.

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