A great community for crowd sourced news and content, Digg is taking a page from the Twitter playbook and testing its mettle in the real-time stream. Similar to Twitter’s Trending Topics, Digg is set to launch Digg Trends. According to a company blog post , the bookmarking community is offering users a chance to view trending stories before they make it to the home page. True to Digg fashion, this public view of the trend firehose comes with a catch. Voters have 10 minutes to digg or bury a story in order to determine whether it occupies valuable homepage real estate.
Digg Trends are identified when stories receive a high volume of comments, favorites and shares. From here a trending story will appear in a box above the site’s “most recent” page content for ten minutes. Within that time frame users decide which stories are worthy for the homepage. In order to ensure that Digg members stay connected to these trends the company is also introducing a new Twitter account with a real-time feed of rising stories. These notifications are likely to increase user engagement and encourage higher traffic to the site during peak hours.
What makes this an ingenious member engagement tool for Digg, is that sub-par articles with a high number of comments are likely to incite action. In the past, many of us simply ignored the sensationalist stories that plagued the lower echelons of Diggdom. Nevertheless, with trolls being a driving force in the determination of trends, users will find themselves clicking through simply to right the wrongs in the Digg universe. While real-time shopping notifications like Woot’s Twitter account incentivize users with deals, Digg knows that its members will keep coming back to maintain a sense of justice. The company will be rolling out the trends feature in the near future.
