The popular comumunity news website Digg will make new verticals and added features part of its next revision, which debuts on June 26th.
Digg has grown tremendously since its arrival on the Internet. Word of the latest update, at least for those of us not receiving guided tours of the revision in advance, arrived via a PR agency. Could a fabled “liquidity event” be in Digg’s future too?
The site will move beyond its tech focus with the newest changes. Four new topic areas, World & Business, Entertainment, Science, and Gaming, plus a Videos category, join the Digg fold, along with attendant subcategories as broken down here:
World & Business (Business & Finance, Politics, World News, Offbeat News),
Entertainment (Celebrity, Movies, Music, Television),
Videos (Animation, Comedy, Educational, Music, People, Gaming),
Science (Space, Environment, Health, General Sciences),
Gaming (Gaming News, Playable Web Games),
and Technology (Apple, Design, Gadgets, Hardware, Industry News, Linux/Unix, Mods, Programming, Security, Software, Tech Deals)
“We are now responding to requests from the Digg community to give them even greater control over the content filtering process with the ability to Digg in new content areas, customize their view, and apply the digg functionality to non-news areas, such as videos,” Rose said in the statement.
In the new version, Digg users will be able to designate specific content areas of interest. The ability to Digg videos will be the first time non-news items can be voted for with diggs by the users.
“From only a few users just a year a half ago, Digg has grown to more than eight million unique visitors each month, with more than 300,000 active registered users,” said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “Digg is harnessing the tremendous interest from the mass Internet audience to participate in and access relevant content more conveniently and faster than traditional means.”
Amazingly enough, that growth is even challenging the online efforts of the “paper of record,” the New York Times. Publishing 2.0 writer Scott Karp showed the traffic numbers for the NYTimes.com site.
“If you extrapolate Digg’s daily page views to about 270 million monthly page views, it is definitely within striking distance of the Times,” Karp wrote. “It’s also possible that Digg could rival The Times in terms of unique visitors in the not too distant future – it’s already half way there based on daily uniques.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.