User-Selected Digg.com Expands

Digg.com is a Web site that ranks various technology news according to users’ recommendation. The Web site currently only limits its topics to technology but it hopes to expand it through videos and topics beyond technology. Users are limited to tech-related categories such as hardware, gaming, digital-music and robots. However, on Monday users will start having access to entertainment and business news. Users will be able to post videos which can be non-news videos. New sub-categories such as games and science is also planned to be on general technology section. Users will have more personal choices like customize their pages, hiding certain categories or subcategories from the site. There will be user’s friends list where they can get the overview of what their friends find interesting along with other interest.

Although Digg began as a technology news Web site in September 2004, it has received great amount of pressure from users to expand. It received 1.3 visitors in May compared to 129,000 a year earlier. The chief executive of Digg Inc. says more users have been posting news that has been non-technology related anyhow.

Digg is unique a community which uncovers items that are rare and otherwise be hard to locate. Big companies like Time Warner Inc.’s AOL are transforming its Netscape portal into user recommendations Web site similar to Digg. The new redesign of Yahoo portal also introduced user-voted items. If Digg users stumble upon something interesting while surfing the net, they can simply “dig,” or post it on Digg.com. You can see at the bottom of this post there is a link to Digg it. The item that receives vote goes up on the list while item lacking enough votes are omitted over time.