Webupon

Digg gives the news – from the people and for the people.  A voting system allows you to vote a story up or down – voting one up is when you digg it.  If you dislike a story you can bury it.  Users on the site can submit stories and if the story becomes popular it is featured on the front page.  Sometimes, though, a little more information can go a long way.  We live in a visual culture and so it is not surprise to discover a number of websites where you can get information about what is happening on Digg in a more visual manner.  Here are a few of them.

This is just brilliant because it combines two things which a certain percentage of the population might consider, well, nerdy.  For me, however, it is something approaching the sublime – a combination of Digg and Tetris.  The game is played in the normal way with one difference.  The pieces represent the stories on Digg and their color and size depend on their subject and popularity.  The only problem with this might be that you get so wrapped up in the game that you forget to dig anything.  Doing that is easy enough, however – you simply click on the story and it will open up on its Digg page without interrupting the flow of the game.  Diggtris itself has received over three thousand diggs.

It is easy enough to lose good stories on Digg as things happen so quickly on the site.  Some might argue that it is part of its appeal but the stack visualizer allows a slower look at what is happening.  This is in real time, so you can see what is happening on up to a hundred stories – not necessarily the top ones either.  The votes from the diggers fall from the top of the screen and the popular stories get the higher stack – and are more brightly colored.  A good way to pass the time or a waste of bandwidth?  It really does depend on how you want to see what is happening on Digg.

Brian Shaler developed this Venn diagram so that you could look up a Digg user and see a diagram comparing the amount of friends they have to the amount of fans that have locked on to them.  And it works.  Mostly.  I thought it might be fun to see the relationship between a Digg user (who seems busy on the site) and his friends and fans – someone called mrbabyman.  The results I got were a little disappointing.  It seems that mrbabyman has way too many contacts for this application to cope.  Now, there’s popular.

Sometimes you need to get a broader and deeper view of what is happening on a site like Digg.  For me, Swarm is not the most satisfying way of seeing what is going on because it doesn’t really do what it says on the label.  Although we can see what a variety of users are doing and how they are connecting up with different stories the interface does not seem very sophisticated and the screen does end up looking like a whole heap of bees swarming around.  In other words it didn’t make much sense to me, but it could have been because I got bored with it and didn’t pay enough attention.

A radar screen shows dates when people joined the site.  When they thumb up a story then (you’ve guessed it) a thumbs up sign appears on the radar screen.  You can then click on to the thumb to see which user made the digg and then, if you so want, take a look at the story itself.  A link will then ultimately take you to the story.  One downfall to this is that is only shows the older members of the Digg community. 

BigSpy is pretty cool, especially if you like to test your reading speed.  As stories are dugg they appear at the top of the screen and then move down as people digg other articles.  The more diggs a story has then the bigger it appears on the screen (and you can see the amount of diggs they have had in brackets to the side of the story title).  Some criticism has been leveled at Digg about a few users controlling more or less what is dugg on the site – and I can’t really see Bigspy changing that.  However, that isn’t really its raison d’être.

If you have an interest in a particular category and want to see the facts and figures of the last five hundred stories in that category then this visualizer may be for you.  It could possibly be accused of giving too much information, however.  Like all of the other visualizers in this collection, however, it is easy enough to get to the story itself once you choose which one you want to read and digg.

Arc is cool.  A sphere appears and gets larger according to the activity on the site (and the speed of your feed to be frank).  As people digg stories across a variety of topics then the arcs trail from one topic to another.  The stories that have the most diggs make arcs which are thicker than those that have less.  If you want to have a closer look at the stories you can click in and eventually get to them!

Underwhelmed with pics at the outset, this does seem like the most ‘liberal’ of all the visualizers supplied by Digg Labs.  One disadvantage of course is that a good percentage of stories do not come with pictures.  However, when one catches your eye you can see useful information about it, plus who dugg it originally.  You then have the option, like all the other Digg Lab products (which can all be downloaded as screensavers) of getting to the story and digging it yourself if you so wish.

All screenshots by author