The social media website Digg unveiled some pre-Christmas goodies for their users, including a Digg for Podcasts beta and some changes to the site’s main page.
The left-side navigation menu and other options have been shifter to the top of the screen, where a new feature debuted.
Registered users can visit the new Podcasts section. It’s an ambitious effort to make podcasts from a broad swath of interests available for Digg users. It also arrives with a new piece of coding to better reflect the popularity of podcasts listed on Digg:
Like all democracies, Digg works best with ongoing participation. So we’ve added something called Active Digging Technology for the podcasting section.
If you Digg a podcast once but don’t Digg again within two weeks, your Digg gets subtracted from the count. (It does not get removed from your profile.) However, as soon as you participate anywhere on the site, your initial Digg is returned to the count.
Users can search for podcasts from the Digg Podcasts page. As with news stories, people can Digg a podcast (or just individual episodes), comment on it, and watch or listen to it.
Digg organizes podcasts by giving them a page, with episodes listed in reverse chronological order. The most-popular episodes will be listed on the right side of the page.
That most-popular list will become more revealing as more users view and Digg episodes of a podcast. For example, the most-popular episodes of Diggnation were virtually in reverse time order at press time.
The user interface update included a more flexible layout. That way people who have huge monitors can get more use out of all that visual real estate.
It also makes the top-navigation shift a more sensible place for those choices.
Videos received a prominent place at the top of the Digg interface, between News and Podcasts.
They also added a couple of new video-specific options, a top-10 video list, and the ability to preview videos on Digg without having to leave the site.
The act of distinguishing News, Videos, and Podcasts Digg areas extends into the user profiles.
Tabs for each of those choices organize them to make it easier for people to track what they have Dugg by category.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
