Digg is getting into the virtual newspaper business, announcing the launch of The Digg Chronicle, along with a revised Top News — Trending feature, and improved viewing of photos and videos.
The Digg Chronicle: Digg Content in Newspaper Form
Posts Tagged ‘Will Larson’
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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. Digg Experiments with Changes to Top News Algorithm
Digg announced another series of tweaks to its Top News algorithm in its continuing attempt to refine the content that appears on users’ homepages.
Digg Tweaks News Filters, Search, About Page
Digg released another series of updates, which include the ability to filter My News by activity type, an updated site header for searching, and a better About site with improved navigation. More from software engineer Will Larson via the Digg Blog:
When a user logs into Digg for the first time, they are now taken directly to their My News Trending page, filled with the most active stories on Digg. Above the list of stories is a brief explanation of how to get started on Digg with links to our more comprehensive explanation on about.digg.com (We have also made a “Getting Started on Digg” video, which will be included soon). All other components of onboarding have been moved into modules on the right column.
To increase quality in the initial experience, we released My News Trending. My News Trending has a major feature that accounts for the improved experience: It is always full of stories. This means that even if you are a brand new user who hasn’t followed a soul or Dugg a story, you will immediately find interesting and timely content.
We developed a module framework for the right column that customizes modules by examining the current user and page. So rather than asking users to immediately pick people to follow and social networks to connect, those steps are spread out over multiple modules. Since only a few modules are ever shown on any given page, the onboarding is distributed over a longer time, reducing friction. Now users can take their time tuning their Digg experience, rather than attempting a huge setup and configuration the first time they create an account and log in.
More Updates, You Digg?
Digg refuses to stand pat, announcing another wave of updates in a post by software engineer Will Larson on the Digg Blog.
All Digg users have been migrated to its new design. A new trending order was created for My News, mixing in the most active content from Top News to prevent shortages of content.
The Who Dugg This module is easier to find, as are the Top Comments from the previous day, thanks to redesigned modules. And the Find People page also underwent a revamp.
Digg Continues to Reinvent Itself
Digg continues to reinvent itself, announcing the rollout of new features, a bug fix, and other changes in a post by software engineer Will Larson on the Digg Blog. Highlights:
When we launched Digg V4, one of the new features was allowing users to link RSS or Atom feeds with their accounts. After being linked, new stories from those feeds would be automatically submitted; the effect was identical to a user submitting those stories by hand. We believed this new feature would bring more great content to Digg. What we didn’t account for was the tremendous impact feed submissions would have on both content discoverability and Top News quality.
As the release cooled down, discussion about the impact of automated submission picked up. Feedback came from the Digg community letting us know that our users had concerns about how feed submissions had changed Digg. In addition to community comments, we started collecting some numbers…and those numbers are in: 95.5 percent of stories on Top News come from manual submission.
Most weekdays, only one to three stories that reach Top News are submitted by feeds. Worse, we were routinely finding fantastic stories submitted from feeds that weren’t getting as much attention as similar stories from manual submission.
After measuring the numbers and deeply considering the Digg community’s feedback, we felt the best course for everyone was to stop feed submissions entirely.
Digg Begins Rolling Out Three New Features
Digg announced the rollout of three new features: a new design; displaying users’ historical number of and percentage of stories promoted to Top News; and optional on-site and email notification when stories are promoted.
The changes will be rolled out to about 15 percent of logged-in users Monday, software developer Will Larson wrote on the Digg Blog, with all users gaining access over the next several weeks.
Larson wrote:
This new design includes a new way to browse between the different sections of the site and an easier way to filter your content. We’ve simplified the design to make stories more prominent and easier to read. The newly organized profile page makes it a snap to see all of your statistics. And last but not least, a new submission flow makes submitting stories easier. We couldn’t wait any longer to share these with our users and gather feedback before a public rollout, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Since launching V4, we’ve been working on importing data from V3 into our new system. It’s ended up taking much longer than we expected, and today’s push will reveal two important statistics: the number of stories each user has had promoted to Top News, and the percentage of stories they have submitted that have reached Top News.
