Digg 3

Just sign up with a free username, roll up your sleeves, and you're ready to Digg stories you find on the Internet. Digg's interface is clean and displays the top 25 stories with links to additional pages of content. Free of unnecessary frills, there's just one low-key banner ad across the top of the page. The Dashboard along the left-hand column allows you to pick your topic preferences and see at a glance what others are reading. You can subscribe to RSS feeds for a particular subject or from a particular user. This simple approach provides an alternative to e-mailing interesting stories to and from your friends or to expect friends to keep up-to-date with your blog. If kids are peering over your shoulder, activate the profanity filter to display four-letter words as four asterisks. Warning: The process of Digging stories can be addictive, as it lets you behave as a critic.

Digg's sparse interface makes it easy to read without annoying ads or graphics, but in some cases, we'd like image thumbnails to flesh out more details.

Digg 3 allows for more customization. Click the Add Or Remove topics link within the left of the screen to narrow topic areas to your liking. Here you can banish subjects that bore you, such as celebrity news. New topic areas are bundled into collapsible Containers that cover World & Business, Entertainment, Videos, and (of course) Science. Conspicuously absent is sporting news, although the new Gaming topic serves those who exercise only their thumbs. By default, you'll see Technology items, but clicking View All will display all kinds of stories that capture the true Digg zeitgeist.

We think the addition of video is a wise move. Don't feel like jumping between YouTube, Google Video, and Yahoo Video to find the latest living-room lip-syncing sensation? Digg 3 can serve as your first point of contact for video searches, with users all over the Web surfing content they like. However, we'd like to see thumbnails of videos so that we wouldn't have to guess before clicking to an external site and to watch. And we're not thrilled that a new browser window opens anytime you want to read the source of a Digg-highlighted story.

Another feature, the DiggCloud, lets you zoom in and out on a visual map and get a sense of the popularity of stories. Built to show what other users are up to, yet another feature, Digg Incoming, displays popular stories within a bar chart, then shows where a Swarm of user popularity is clustered.