Digg

My first day at Digg, I began to notice a disproportionate number of laughs coming from coworkers across the office. Sometimes subtle giggles, other times full bellied chortles, I became concerned there was something in the water. Well, there is something in the water: we work on a site which collects the most important--and funniest--stories from across the internet.

Soon, I became hooked. While testing tweaks and coding changes, I kept reading Top News, browsing My News and Digging all the good stuff. The more I enjoyed the best content on Digg, the more I wanted to be a part of sifting through new stories and finding the diamonds. Rather than reading today's top picks, I wanted to be an editor picking them.

Now I can. And so can you. Welcome to the Digg Newswire.

The Digg Newswire

When you come to Digg you'll see Newswire Beta on the top navigation. Click it! You'll arrive on the Digg Newswire, which gives you the tools to shape the breaking stories on Digg. While stories arrives on Top News every ten minutes, news appears in the Newswire in real-time: submit an article and it'll immediately be at the top of Recent within Newswire. As the story is Dugg, it’ll move up in the Trending rank within Newswire.

A big part of picking the best stories on Digg is finding them, and the Newswire comes equipped with a variety of tools to fuel your discovery expeditions. First are the sorts:

• Trending is ordered by stories' popularity. We calculate popularity by looking at how many Diggs, Likes and Tweets it has, who has Dugg it, when it was submitted, the past quality of similar stories, and a handful of other signals.
• Recent is ordered by when articles are submitted to Digg.

In addition to selecting a sort, there are more options for focusing your exploration:

• Topic (like Technology or Politics) only shows stories within that category.
• Media (Images, Videos or Text) filter stories by type of content.
• Minimum Diggs (say 2, 5 or 25) only shows stories with at least that many Diggs.
• Maximum Diggs (for example 10 or 50) only shows stories with at most that many Diggs.

Here are a couple combinations recommended by courageous testers from the Digg community and Digg staffers:

• dirtyfries and emfk preferred the Trending sort without any filters. (That's why it's the default!)
• oboy and louiebaur liked only seeings stories with at least 10 or at least 25 Diggs.
• richid used the Recent sort with a low minimum and low maximum to find newer stories which have just started to gain momentum.
• gvoakes preferred Recent with at least 1 Digg to be the first Digger on new submissions.

After trying some of these and testing out other options, you'll probably have your own favorite combinations.

Newswire Activity Feed

While the Newswire storylists are updated in real-time, it also has a real-time Activity Feed which shows what other Diggers are doing in the Newswire. When you are inside the Newswire, your Diggs and your buries will show up in that module. There is also a full page version of the Newswire Activity Feed which is a great list of stories Diggers are discovering.

If you Digg or bury on other parts of Digg (be it Top News, a story's comments page, or My News) they will not show up in the Newswire Activity Feed. Your actions outside of the Newswire will still impact Newswire Trending, but activity within the Newswire is given a much higher weight: with transparency comes influence.

We've worked hard on the Newswire, and hope you love it. Over the coming weeks and months the core ideas (rewarding transparency, showing real-time content and activity, increasing visibility of how actions impact story ranking) will be spreading across the rest of Digg.

As part of that process we will be reaching out to many of you for feedback. At one end, we've had beta-testers suggest that we replace Upcoming entirely with Newswire (we agree, and are planning to phase out Upcoming as Newswire loses its Beta monicker!). And at the other, we're gathering feedback on how to adapt these ideas to My News, Top News and new features still under heavy development. The Digg community's voice has shaped the Newswire, and you'll be guiding our upcoming work as well.

The next few months should be a lot of fun.

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As always, please let us know any comments or bugs you find, you can give us a shout over on Twitter with your feedback and questions.