The Most Fun Ways To Track Digg Stories

I love Digg because it is the best way to monitor the latest online buzz and hottest news. To track Digg effectively you should be aware of a couple of things:

(1) it is a must to check the Upcoming ‘Most Diggs’ section as stories hitting the front pages are usually 24 hours old (so you risk missing some important news).

(2) Checking Digg daily may be addictive; on the other hand, you can just grow tired of it.

To prevent this, check out some cool entertaining ways to track Digg activity.

1. BigSpy (By Digg labs)

is the most fun way to spy on Digg’s submissions: the font size represents the story popularity:

Other Digg labs projects include:

• Stack visualizes individual users’ votes as Tetris-like falling bricks, creating a bar graph of popular headlines that grows in real time.
• Arc is a constantly growing circle around which stories are arranged as users digg them.
• Swarm represents how individual users cluster around popular stories: when the same user votes for two stories, a tentacle reaches out and tugs those “cells” closer together.

2. Diggtris

is an online Tetris-like game based on dugg stories. The size and color of the blocks depend on the category the story belongs to and the total number of diggs the story has.

3. Digglicious

keeps track of upcoming and popular stories at Digg, Delicious and Reddit. The best thing about the tool that it is easy and keeps all information on one page.

4. Comment Spy

tracks Digg comments and updates in real time:

5. Wheel of Upcoming

visualizes upcoming stories in the form of a wheel: you can rotate it back and forth, stop it anywhere, click and see the submission details.

6. DiggGraphr

represents each submission by a rectangle: the area occupied by each rectangle is proportioned to the number of Diggs relative to the other stories in that channel.

• By hovering over any rectangle you can see the story description;
• Clicking on any rectangle sends you to the submission page;
• Right-clicking lets you choose to either go to the submission page or to the story source page.

7. DiggTop

is a pretty cool desktop app that requires Adobe® AIR™ runtime. It gives a handy compact version of Digg (list of stories to the left and description to the right). You can choose to view the submission only in a few (or one) preferred categories or subcategories.

Mark mentioned DiggTop in his Digg tools article here.

8. Digg’s Top Stories

is a plugin for the Google Desktop Sidebar. It keeps track of the most recent hot Digg stories and displays the story title, short description and time it went hot. When clicked, the story description expands and the submission link appears.

How do you track Digg? Please share your thoughts!