As of today digg has category check boxes for customizing digg stories. You can un-check topics you do not wish to see. This is a great step in the direction of making digg hit more target audiences. But I believe it can be taken farther.

I propose a more advanced customization system which will allow for more functionality in the future. What I’m thinking about is a system very similar to Smart Folders on Macs. Basically users will be able to create smart topics of their own which will show up in the topic bar.

How would this work?

To conceptualize this you’ll need to step outside of the box for a minute. Right now, when a box is checked it shows everything in that category. If I don’t want to hear about Election or Political stories currently, I would need to un-check those categories on the customize page. Now lets say I don’t care about all the stories as a whole, but I want to hear about a specific candidate (Joe Smith). With the smart filter feature I would create a Smart Feature topic with the following options:

Filter Name: Joe Smith

Rules
Where Title contains ‘Joe Smith’ and
Category is ‘US Elections 2008′ and
Media Type is News

This will give me another topic in my category bar with the ‘Joe Smith’ topic under Custom. Then only Election stories about Joe Smith will show up on my front page and I can navigate to the custom category page at will.

This will be great and all but it raises the question about what if I have ‘US Elections 2008′ checked also. In this case, all election stories will show up on the All page, but I will still have my Custom filter to view only those topics specifically.

This functionality leads to a broader user base because suddenly the news that the users see can be manipulated to topics of their interest.  This also gives the topics functionality back to the users, as users can create topics that interest them. Instead of the topics that Digg employees think they want.

Digg is very good at giving me the most popular content on the web. Since its inception this content included news, flash games, images, videos, podcast episodes, lists, how to, and articles.

The idea behind digg is that the news is user approved (not editor approved). But there are some aspects of digg that remain under single user control. Here are the list of aspects that are under multi-user control and single-user control.

multi-user control

• podcasts
• stories
• comments

single-user control

• story category
• story title
• story link
• story description

All of the single-user controlled items can be converted to multi-user controlled. Here’s how…

Story Category:

When a story is submitted it’s up to the submitter to pick the category. This is problematic. If the submitter misunderstood the article or simply picked a bad category. This can be solved by getting the user’s feedback when they select bury>wrong topic. Digg can ask the user which topic the story belongs in.

Once the Wrong Topic bury is clicked, the suggest category box could look like this

Then if the system gets enough votes, the stories topic will be changed.

Story Title:

The story title on digg is often misspelled, misleading, incorrect grammar, or just incorrect. In digg’s case the power of the people should be used again. The story can have an edit icon next to each title. When the edit button is clicked the title is replaced with a text box that has suggest features.

The user clicks on the small pencil to the right of the title.

Story Links:

Story links are sometimes direct links that go straight to the story described. Most of the time links are broken, down, or blog spam.

The best link can be suggested just like the best title. When you click the edit link button a text box with an suggest feature will appear.

This will cut back on people posting the links in the comments.

Story Description:

Now the story description is a little bit tougher. Because of the length of the description it would be impracticable to do the same as the link and the title. So my suggestion is this.

When a story is submitted the description that the user puts in will become the first comment of the story. So this comment will remain the story’s description as long as it is the most dugg comment. When another user submits a comment and gets dugg up, then that comment will become the description

Summary:

Digg became a fun and unique site because of the control it gave to all of the users. Not all aspects are up to multiple users.

The category, title, link, and description can be updated to benefit from the masses.