Digg has launched a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends. The feature will promote “certain highly active stories” as they are trending, not unlike Twitter’s trending topics.
The feature could give stories a better chance of getting more exposure when they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily made it to the front page. Digg’s Kurt Wilms explains:
Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage.
Digg says the goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and present a fun way for people to express whether they like a story or not. “We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible,” says Wilms.
Digg has often been criticized for being too clique-ish, meaning it has been hard to get on the home page without having the right friends, although Digg has taken steps to make the site better for more people in the past. This should help that as well.
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