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Can You Guess Which Categories Make The Digg Home Page Most?

centernetworks.com — Is Digg still pushing other categories outside of tech or have they returned to their roots? To find out, I did a manual count of all of the current frontpage stories going back approximately 24 hours and here are the raw counts in descending order.

Who dugg this? Made popular Feb 20, 2008

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  • daniel, on 02/20/2008, -16/+146I miss the old digg.
  • spammishking, on 02/20/2008, -5/+101 In December Digg hired a bank to help them look at a sale of the service. At that time I wrote that Digg opened the site to push more non-tech stories to help prospective buyers get a look at what the site could be if it was mainstream. Where are we two months later? Is Digg still pushing other categories outside of tech or have they returned to their roots? We know that gaining a mainstream audience for Digg could not only help them sell but also get more lucrative advertising deals.
    To find out, I did a manual count of all of the current frontpage stories going back approximately 24 hours (~11 pages worth) and below are the raw counts in descending order.
    * World News - 14
    * General Sciences - 9
    * Movies - 8
    * Tech Industry News - 8
    * Travel - 8
    * Odd Stuff - 7
    * US Elections - 7
    * Comedy - 7
    * Nintendo - 6
    * Environment - 5
    * People - 5
    * Space - 5
    * Design - 5
    * Educational - 5
    * Business/Finance - 5
    * Gaming News - 4
    * Food and Drink - 4
    * Pets - 4
    * Linux - 3
    * Political News - 3
    * Gadgets - 3
    * Security - 3
    * Apple - 2
    * Comics - 2
    * Television - 2
    * Basketball - 2
    * Celebrity - 2
    * Political Opinion - 2
    * Music - 2
    * Baseball - 1
    * Arts and Culture - 1
    * Other Sports - 1
    * Hardware - 1
    * Software - 1
    * Autos - 1
    * PC Games - 1
    What does this tell us? If we don't include gaming in tech, 15% of all frontpage stories were tech related; with gaming the number moves to 25%. Programming hasn't hit the frontpage in nearly two days, software once in three days. Is this what you expected?
    ***Longest comment ever
  • chewbacca77, on 02/20/2008, -1/+9024 hours? Try not to be so comprehensive next time. That's like flipping a coin twice and saying that it always lands heads up.
  • akkibaba, on 02/20/2008, -6/+92Here's the ultimate Digg story:
    Top Ten things Ron Paul does on his Ubuntu powered iPhone while anonymously protesting against the Co$
  • Terr01, on 02/20/2008, -0/+46**** For trivially small values of "ever".
  • slkuhn, on 02/20/2008, -2/+47The results will vary on a day to day basis. Just imagine if he did this extensive scientific study during the HD-DVD encryption key bro-ha-ha.
  • skillfull, on 02/20/2008, -1/+44no surprise with the answer ...
  • sekhui, on 02/20/2008, -0/+4124 hours is a ridiculously short sample period to try to draw any concrete conclusions from.
  • slkuhn, on 02/20/2008, -1/+27god damn it. work => word.
    I suck at the internets
  • magicaltrevor, on 02/20/2008, -0/+24http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Ron_Paul_uses_Li ...
  • chewbacca77, on 02/20/2008, -1/+24...with pics.
  • slkuhn, on 02/20/2008, -0/+22sorry, after trying to look up the history of the work I realized that it's spelled brouhaha
  • suxmonkey, on 02/20/2008, -2/+22Noo I really want to know but the site is down. Mirror?!
  • EmitStop, on 02/20/2008, -0/+15I would have thought that Comedy would be higher on the list.
  • greenlight2001, on 02/20/2008, -0/+14*** ... I'm not sure what's going on here.
  • inactive, on 02/20/2008, -2/+16if this was last month, the top topic would had been Ron Paul...
  • AndrewWiggin, on 02/20/2008, -5/+18The thing is, digg easily allows us to customize the homepage when we log in in order to only look at the categories we're interested in. So I could care less that most stories are not tech related even though that's what I am interested in. It doesn't mean that people who were going to submit tech stories aren't submitting them anymore.
  • BruceBogtrotter, on 02/21/2008, -1/+12But we are getting less tech news then in the old days.
  • dvdchris, on 02/20/2008, -0/+11How to get to Digg front page: Submit the 39th Engadget article titled "ZOMG HD-DVD Officially Dead For Real!!"
  • gandhii, on 02/20/2008, -5/+16then click on the tech link at the top... nobody is making you read about world events if you don't want to.
  • stalefries, on 02/20/2008, -1/+12It's ok, I'll still digg you up. :)
  • Daiken, on 02/20/2008, -0/+10He did the count manually...so he probably didn't want to waste a lot of time.
  • stalefries, on 02/20/2008, -0/+9*** Only true if using rational numbers.
    "Longest comment in 14i days!"
  • Daiken, on 02/20/2008, -0/+8Sorry but Ron Paul is no longer the Digg favorite. It's OBAMARAMA!
  • Gunsdead, on 02/20/2008, -1/+9A broken watch is right on time twice a day. The sample period is far too small to draw any meaningful conclusions.
  • SvetlanaG, on 02/20/2008, -1/+9Very interesting summary. I think it would be interesting to have such stats compiled automatically in a continuous manner - sure it is not a vital information for the users but still interesting to see what the users digg the most.
  • futureb, on 02/21/2008, -0/+7Wow. A manual count going back 24 Hours? That should give you a *very* scientific answer.
    /sarcasm
  • sputza, on 02/20/2008, -2/+8I'm a bit surprised that Apple was not the first... since there are so many fanboys.
  • scotticus, on 02/21/2008, -0/+6And crappy stats at that... what a small population size. If you're going to waste my time reading your blog spam, at least collect statistically relevant amounts of data.
  • ronocdh, on 02/20/2008, -0/+6Well, it probably would be, if submitters ever bothered to categorize right!
  • Furkle, on 02/20/2008, -0/+6You know what though? The stories are being submitted but nobody is digging them, you only have yourselves to blame. Visit the upcoming section once in a while and hell maybe the tech stories will actually make the front page more often.
  • Dunhamzzz, on 02/20/2008, -0/+6Well it didn't occur in the last 24 hours so it isn't is it.
  • Veni_Vidi_Vici, on 02/20/2008, -1/+6I was shocked to learn that diggers are so uneducated that they would digg celebrity stories. Let these people live their lives. Who cares what they're doing, you certainly aren't helping anything buy populating store shelves with gossip when we should be selling real news.
    (I blocked that lame category long ago, I forgot it existed).
  • Authustian, on 02/20/2008, -2/+7All i have to say is.... 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

    hehe, that'll just never get old to me.

    kinda like: This was a triumph....
  • hassanchop13, on 02/20/2008, -1/+6dont forget the NSFW
  • fcekuahd, on 02/21/2008, -1/+6Actually, the stories that make the front page mostly belong in the "***** Pointless Trivia" category. They're just miscategorized.
  • Ocelot13, on 02/20/2008, -0/+5& EVER!!!11!!!!
  • ausfahrt, on 02/20/2008, -1/+6I thought ALL would be #1
  • BruceBogtrotter, on 02/21/2008, -0/+5I hope that was sarcasm.
  • chrisinsocalif, on 02/20/2008, -1/+6I am glad to see 2girls1cup is not on the list.
  • inactive, on 02/20/2008, -0/+5And add "while watching NSFW HD DVD "
  • sfrench, on 02/20/2008, -0/+5The API ListStories endpoint exposes most of this data without the need for manual counting.
    http://apidoc.digg.com/ListStories

    Example to get the last 10 stories:
    http://services.digg.com/stories/popular?count=10& ...

    Wrap that call in a little shell script and grab a couple thousand for a more accurate picture, OR put on time constraints and see if certain times of the year are better for certain topics.
  • jsd8cc, on 02/20/2008, -4/+9It's sad, really...
  • Twelvevolts, on 02/20/2008, -1/+5I thought the biggest category was people coming up with boring stats about what people read on Digg - get a life i say.
  • ZephyrNinety, on 02/20/2008, -1/+5Where is my daily Mario post?
  • Jaliyl, on 02/21/2008, -1/+5Ron Paul, Obama, Chuck Norris, the cheeseburger in a can and a few Lolcats team up to defeat the Co$, Clinton, Bush, Microsoft and the RIAA by hacking them all with a new distro of linux that has awesome powers.
  • blacktriangle, on 02/21/2008, -0/+4Rick Roll yourself here:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU
  • jsd8cc, on 02/21/2008, -0/+4Yeah, you're right... "Kid goes absolutely nuts over Myspace" really informs us about the issues concerning technology and important world affairs.
  • Larz0rz, on 02/21/2008, -0/+4Buried for not being about World News, Games and/or Technology.
  • atbnet, on 02/20/2008, -0/+4This would be more conclusive if you were to study say 30 days worth a data. The topics that hit front page depend on what's going on in news for that day. Some days you get news of really interesting tech developments. Some days you don't, so the frontpage is supplemented with the other topics. Shoot when Apple releases a new product it isn't unusual to see at least five different stories about it.
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