Posted 10/09/08 at 04:10:30 PM by Alex Castle

Browsing the Digg homepage, you’re bound to see a lot of links about videogames, open source, and Barack Obama. For all you readers of the Max PC blog, that might seem like a good thing, but according to founder Kevin Rose, it’s time for that to change. In “The Future of News,” a talk at the Future of Web Apps conference, Rose said that Digg needs to shed its status as a geek bastion and do more for the average web-surfer.

In the talk Rose outlined several of the strategies that Digg will employ to expand its userbase.  One thing the site needs to do, he said, is get more users participating. Presently, even though more than 30 million people use the site a month, only 3 million have registered accounts, meaning that the vast majority of people who read Digg aren’t affecting which links make the homepage.

Digg needs to provide an experience that’s relevant to each individual user, Rose stressed. Along these lines, the site intends to allow users to filter out links about subjects they don’t care about, and is developing ways to automatically sort users into groups based on their interests.  Also, the site is looking to weight users’ Diggs by their history as an accurate (or inaccurate) predictor of popular links.

Will Digg lose its geek following as it tries to go mainstream?  Let us know what you think.

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Software, digg, kevin rose, web 2.0, news aggregation

Posted 09/30/08 at 06:22:27 PM by Will Smith

Odds are, we’ve all done it: Clicked that little Digg button on a story we liked or were entertained by or just plain laughed at. But have you ever considered the unbelievable traffic pushing-power you have as a button-masher, even as the smallest cog in the Digg army? To find out exactly how much cold, hard cash your click on a Digg badge is worth, we plugged a bunch of publicly available information into our handy-dandy spreadsheet, and hit the calculate button.

Hit the jump for the complete, site-by-site breakdown and find out what YOUR Digg is worth.

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digg, value, gizmodo, lifehacker, $$$

Posted 08/19/08 at 11:11:07 AM by Paul Lilly

Another social news voting system gets added to the web today as Yahoo opens up its Buzz to the public. Prior to the public release, only about 400 publishers could contribute new links to the service, though anyone could see them and vote buzz up or down what they consider to be the most/least interesting news stories.

The release comes with little fanfare or hype, an interesting move for a service that hopes to contend with similar sites like Digg and Reddit. Separating itself from the pack, Buzz's algorithms also analyze search engine popularity rather than remain purely community driven, and Yahoo's editors still program the Yahoo.com front page.

While it's far too early to predict how Buzz will fare, the social service could gain some traction both by leveraging other Yahoo communities, and by luring participation by having some of the most popular news items posted on its main page.

Thoughts on Buzz - can you dig(g) it?

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windows, Software, digg, Yahoo, Social Networking, buzz

Posted 07/26/08 at 08:35:06 AM by Pulkit Chandna

In the midst of rumors regarding Google being close on the heels of a $200 million takeover of Digg, there is news of a major addition to the populist news aggregator. Digg CEO Jay Adelson announced at a party - attended by 300 fans of the website – that in the next 6 months users will be able to create their own sub-Diggs, whereby they will be fully in control of the mini-websites.

They will get to decide the number of stories that are flashed on the front page of their website. This obviously means that the cutthroat scuffle for a place on the main website’s front page will relax a touch in coming times as some of the traffic will be diverted to the user-controlled sub-Diggs. Some of you might be aware that such sub-sites are already available on Reddit and Mixx. However, the addition of this feature on Digg should have a far-reaching impact and might even make life even more difficult for Digg-clones.

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Software, Internet, digg, reddit, social news, sub-sites, sub-diggs, maxx

Posted 07/24/08 at 07:57:04 AM by Chris Moody

It looks like Google may be in final negotiations to acquire Digg for somewhere in the $200 million range. TechCrunch.com reports that negotiations that have been on and off again, have been moving along for the last six weeks. A letter of intent has been signed and a deal is close that will bring Digg under Google News.

As close as a deal is with Google, it could still not come to fruition. Microsoft has previously expressed interest in Digg and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a pending Google deal to stir Microsoft’s interest in Digg again. It seems most of Digg’s revenue comes from a three year ad deal with Microsoft.

The big fish are gobbling up the little fish, but will Microsoft want a nibble too?

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microsoft, Google, digg, deal, Acquire

Posted 05/04/07 at 07:00:06 PM by Maximum PC Staff

This week we talk about the Digg riots, Dell selling Ubuntu, and the death of the UMPC (you remember, it's Orgami)

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/maximumpc/1337

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dell, Podcast, digg, umpc, kevin rose, ubuntu

Posted 05/02/07 at 02:01:23 AM by Will Smith

Censorship of a HD DVD encryption key sparked a massive online riot. That massive riot brought digg.com to its knees. Will Smith wonders if digg will recover.

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Internet, news, Podcast, mpaa, digg, riot, HD DVD, weird, fair use