DIGG is a news website that gives editorial control back to the community. Most websites allow users to suggest content by submitting links or stories to an editor. If the editor believes the story to be relevant to the masses, he or she moves the story to the homepage. With digg, users also submit links for review. But rather than allowing an editor to decide which links go on the homepage, the users do.
There are several categories in which you can submit your link, title and short description ranging from music to technology. The system keeps a track of duplicates so no double linking occurs. An extensive search also keeps you updated of recent happenings in their huge database of links.
The principle of site promotion is simple – Users visit and like your link, “digg story” and if your link gets enough diggs of popularity, it moves the link from the digg area, and promotes it to the home and category pages. You can see the Top Stories sorted by day, week, month or year to see the popular links.
An extensive profile keeps track of what you posted, what you ‘digged’ and how many post made it to the front page. The community keeps check for content and your story may be been removed from digg for two reasons for automatic fraud click detection or the user report feature.
The ‘digg Story’ feature works beautifully by javascript. Just click the ‘Digg’ link and a cool javascipt effect flashes the story, updates the digg’s and adds you to the people who digged the story. An interesting feature is the Digg Spy – it checks in real time the links and stories people are digging without refreshing the page. Very useful to detect new sites gaining popularity.
Use your favorite RSS reader or Firefox’s live bookmarks to keep track as RSS feeds are available on almost all pages and user profiles throughout the site. You can also add the Digg News Feed to your website or blog by inserting a simple javascript code which can be customised to your choice of links and css to suit your site. Works great on blogs also. Choose a story that you wish to blog, then click “blog”. digg will instantly post that story to your website. Supported blogs: Typepad, Live Journal, Blogger, Moveable Type, and WordPress.
Have you submitted your story to Digg or have you Digged yet? Also see this Complete Digg Tools Collection.