• DZone – Great site for development news and blog stories, they have plenty of tags to let you filter out what you use. The site gets a lot of submissions but not enough votes on the submissions to figure out what is really good (the top stories for 24 hours may only have 15 or 8 votes). Also the AJAX scrollbar is irritating to me.
• DesignFloat – Focuses on web design news and tips, but most of the submissions are nothing but lists.
• DesignBump – Another site about web design news and lots of lists
• Sphinn – Dedicated to internet marketing
• reddit – Similar to Digg, but the design is too plain and submitting stories can be a pain as they make you wait a long time before submitting again. The submissions are pretty general so expect a lot of weird images, funny videos and bizarre news.
• Slashdot – The classic technology news site is still around and has improved a bit, but it doesn’t have as that much information on web development and design.
• Mixx (classic) – The submitted stories aren’t as good as they should be, but you’ll get the top news stories. The site has a general audience, so the technology news isn’t what it could be. I really dislike how they changed the homepage for mixx.com because they wanted to promote tweetmixx which doesn’t seem much more than something that could be a sidebar.
• Propeller – Another general news site.
• Yahoo! Buzz – Another site to find the top news stories online

Top Users
This was a list of the top users, which listed the a user’s username, how many stories they had got on the homepage, how many submissions they had made, the ratio of homepage stories to submissions, how many stories they dugg, how many comments they had made, and how many pageviews their profile had recieved. Later on it was broken into 2 tabs one for Top Diggers and the other for Top Submitters. This was a great feature in the beginning as it featured those who helped make digg what it was. However, as the Digg algorithm became more important it let to the conclusion that the top users (power users or submitters) were the ones that had an unfair advantage of what made the frontpage.

Digg Spy (the original non-flash version)
I always like the non-flash version of Digg Spy, it was a great way of seeing what was becoming popular or unpopular (you could see buries). I showed this to people when I needed to give them an idea of what AJAX was and let them know that this was pretty much real time data. It was taken down since they had built another version of it in Flash.

Digg Shout
A messaging system for users to contact each other through Digg to help get friends or other users to promote stories they submitted or for messages in general. However, it ended up becoming mostly a spammy system where people tried to get everyone to promote their own stories. However you could disable this feature or only allow friends to shout to you. It was replaced by email, Twitter and Facebook sharing links.

DiggBar
I believe this was introduced to help stickiness (to keep traffic on Digg as much as possible) since it gave a shortened URL for all links and put the site linked to below in an IFRAME. It also featured a random button that would send you to another story, which many believed was a way to compete with StumbleUpon. Originally you could also type digg.com/ before the URL of any page you’re on to create a short URL. As of writing, this feature hasn’t been removed, but Kevin Rose has stated it is going away.

Blog This
A feature that let you blog about a story that you or someone else submitted. Was considered no longer needed once they added the email, Twitter and Facebook sharing links.

Digg Clouds
This was basically a tag cloud, but for stories submitted to Digg. This was replaced by the Upcoming section.

Digg Comments with a Slashdot style rating system
Many may not know that the comment rating system Digg used in the early days, was very similar to Slashdot. They used to let you rate a comment as +3 Excellent, +2 Insightful, +1 Useful, 0 Neutral, -1 Redundant, -2 Flame, -3 SPAM. Eventually they went to the simple, thumbs up or thumbs down.

Comments replies via email that sent you the reply
Digg finally realized they should email you replies to your comments (I always wondered why they didn’t do this earlier). However, I believe they decided to remove the actualy reply to your comment for 2 reasons. One being that it was susceptible to spam, but I think the biggest reason was to get more pageviews by making you want to see what someone said and you had to visit the link they sent you to do that.

Categories Digg has removed

• Deals – This was for finding great tech deals online. However, it wasn’t used very much, but then again, there probably aren’t that many good deals out there on a regular basis.
• Robots – A section for robotics, but wasn’t used all that much so it went away.
• Election 2008 – Makes sense since they only needed it for that time period.

Like any good website Digg has evolved and continues to try new things to see what works and what doesn’t. I still wish they had remained true to their technology niche, but at least I can filter out the categories I don’t like and disable image and video submissions.

Digg Traffic Dropping

Even on Google Trends Digg is dropping off and falling. For some reason, Fark jumped up last summer and is now surpassing Digg in Google’s search queries. Has the wisdom of the crowd now turned into the combined idiocy of the immature?

Digg on Google Trends

You may already know MySpace peaked last summer and has been dropping, while Facebook and Twitter having been growing.

MySpace traffic dropping

• You hear about news much sooner
• News promoted by users rather than editors
• RSS feeds for everything (even search)
• RSS feeds that include the proper categories (Slashdot only includes the first category and omits the rest)
• API (this allows you to filter things or mashup the news how you want)
• Contact form (Slashdot doesn’t have one)

Slashdot

• Technology Focused
• Just news (no funny videos or pictures, although some people want to see those)
• Better comment filtering and ratings

The typical comparisons I’ve read state that Digg has more childish comments and that Slashdot’s comments are usually better. Slashdot does have several users that seem to be a expert in a given field by reading their comments, so that case maybe slightly true. However ou can find just as many poor comments on Slashdot as you do on Digg, but you probably won’t see much ASCII art on Slashdot get rated very high. And even though Slashdot’s Firehose gives users the chance to promote other user submitted stories they still must be approved by the editors. This may lead to some staleness in the site, as I got tired in seeing the same old discussions over and over on Slashdot. Any time the RIAA was mentioned the same old arguments came up and the same with Microsoft or Vista. Slashdot also doesn’t cover web design or web development very well either, if it ever comes up it’s because Google changed or released something. Slashdot seems to be more hardware, application development and operating system focused. Personally, I gave up on Slashdot well over a year ago, because I couldn’t filter the feeds good enough, the lack of web dev/design news and the repetitious arguments in the comments.

Yahoo! Buzz is another story promotion site along the same vein as Digg. Yahoo promises a API soon, but their feeds already send the original story link, category and thumbnail in it. They need to add more categories, however I think the site is too general already. Its great for the person that just wants quick general news in a wide range of interests but more categories or a tagging system is needed to filter out much of the same news all around the web.

Dzone is a developer’s focused Digg site. It’s a decent site, despite it doesn’t have enough users or enough high quality data coming in. They have a huge amount of categories which can help you filter out what you want or don’t want. Personally I’d like it if they added the original story link’s to their feeds.

You might think would decrease the number of people that go to the site, but it would increase the number of people that use the site’s feeds. In return the site might become popular enough to get a higher ranking on Google; Thus, advertising revenue would increase, more people would submit stories to get better SEO, more people would login to vote stories up or down to prevent spam and better control the quality of frontpage and to make comments. But of course this is all speculation, but maybe they should just take that chance to see what happens.

Since using Digg’s API, I’ve found myself going to Digg only when there is a good story that I want to read the comments on, when I get really bored and want to see stories in the categories I’m not using the API for. Digg still gets plenty of traffic, despite the fact their API has been released for well over year. Dzone has potential to pick up where Digg left off but for now I’ll think I’ll pass it up.

• Pligg – The most popular Digg clone. Pligg is based on code written for Meneame by Ricardo Galli. I’ve noticed the the Pligg website, license and source links no longer mention Meneame or Ricardo Galli, which is unfortunate. The code has undergone quite a overhaul, but chances Pligg would of never existed in the first place without Ricardo Galli releasing the code for Meneame. However, I’m sure someone else would of written a open source Digg clone eventually.
• Drigg – A module for Drupal that can make your site work like Digg
• PHPDug – I haven’t tried this one, but its interesting that someone else made a Digg Clone
• diggClone – This project seems abandoned


/*
<digg:diggCount>95</digg:diggCount>
<digg:submitter>
<digg:username>kilooneniner</digg:username>
<digg:userimage>http://digg.com/userimages/k/i/l/kilooneniner/medium9515.jpg</digg:userimage>
</digg:submitter>
<digg:category>Political News</digg:category>
<digg:commentCount>9</digg:commentCount>
*/
//DIGG NAMESPACES
$digg_count = $item->get_item_tags('http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/', 'diggCount');
$digg_comments = $item->get_item_tags('http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/', 'commentCount');
$digg_category = $item->get_item_tags('http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/', 'category');
$digg_submitter = $item->get_item_tags('http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/', 'submitter');
$digg_username = $digg_submitter[0]['child']['http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/']['username'];
$digg_userimage = $digg_submitter[0]['child']['http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/']['userimage'];
if (!empty($digg_count[0]['data']))
$data .= '<br /><span class="minor">' . $digg_count[0]['data'] . ' diggs &middot; ' . $digg_comments[0]['data'] . ' comments &middot; ' . $digg_category[0]['data'] . ' &middot; ' . $digg_username[0]['data'] . ' &middot; ' . $digg_userimage[0]['data'] . '</span>';


Using something like the following helps traverse the arrays to figure out how to get the data.

print_r($digg_submitter);//will show array to parse to get stuff


10. steve jobs
9. brittney, brittney spears
8. paris, hilton, paris hilton
7. porn, pornography
6. digg, diggers
5. top ten, top 10, top ###
4. apple
3. pic, pics, picture, pictures, photo, photos, photograph, photographs
2. kevin rose
1. iphone

10. dugg down for blogspam

9. _____ _____ no digg

8. _____ _____ your mom

7. site down already?

6. buried for _____

5. how is this blogspam?

4. duplicate story

3. diggmirror http://_____

2. _____ _____ _____ being on digg all day

1. 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Yeah I had to add that last one . Don’t get me wrong I enjoy using Digg for fast tech news and cool links.