Digg 3.0 launches with broader news coverage

Digg will launch a new version of its site on Monday and begin carrying non-technology based stories and user-generated video.

Founder Kevin Rose announced the launch of Digg 3.0 on Talkcrunch.com.

He said: "Top to bottom it is a complete redesign of the site.

"We have kept the same basic concept with the Digg button, but we are expanding into all different types of content, as far as all different types of news is concerned."

Launched in December 2004 as an experiment to eliminate the need for an editor, the collaborative technology news site - that ranks stories based on user's votes - now rivals The New York Times for popularity online.

Founders claim that site traffic and page views for the US website are doubling every two months and that between 1,500 and 2,000 stories are submitted daily.

The site, which claims to have eight-and-a-half million unique visitors a month and nine million unique page views every day, uses a non-hierarchical editorial control system where users submit stories.

Users then vote for individual stories and those that gain the highest number move onto the front page.

The redesign will mean that when users submit stories they will be able to determine a specific category under which it will be listed.

Users will then be able to manipulate the site so they can view only the specific news categories that appeal to them.

Mr Rose added: "We are launching what we call containers which are groups of topics bundled together.

"So inside of Digg, when you go to the new home page, you’ll see containers on the left-hand-side that can collapse and expand to display all the different topics that reside in the containers.

"All the existing topics we have for technology will be bundled inside the technology container, and we have other containers:  science, world and business, entertainment and gaming.

"We are also launching for the first time the ability to Digg things other than news and we are launching a container for videos online.

"We want to be the clearing house for all things, Youtube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and we'll have several topics that will fall into that videos container."

Last week, Netscape launched a beta news site emulating the Digg formula, combining elements of social bookmarking - where users recommend and rank their top choices for news stories - with a traditional editor-driven news selection policy.

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