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