From The Archives - While you are here, don’t forget to check 45 Best Social News Websites To Garner More Traffic that we did on 1WD a long time back. Most of them are still as effective now as they were back then.

What is a Social News Website?

Well, everyone is fully aware of Digg, right? Digg is the perfect example of a Social News Website. Users can either visit their fave news websites directly to read the latest news or they can register for RSS feeds of that website which will keep them updated about the latest news. Social News Websites are another way to keep yourself updated with the best possible news that is recommended by others in the community.

Social News Websites are link generators to be precise. The links are submitted by the community that is part of that social news website. In some cases Social News Websites use automated ways to generate news links instead of depending on user based submissions. After aggregation of links these websites sort the links on the basis of categories and lastly manual votes by the community. These votes decide the importance of some news and increase the reach of that news article.

Read - Pligg: A Social Network Content Management System that can be used to launch your own Social News Website.

Trends that Stick with Social News Website Designs

Quickly, here are few of the trends that have kept social news websites sticking around even when most of the startups have come and gone in the last few years:

• Focus on Content - As I pointed out at the beginning of this article, Reddit is still around due to its focus on content. Reddit has done well to minimize everything other than the stories which helps the readers focus on stories and vote for them if necessary. Some of the social news website designs leave space for a thumbnail which supports the article and explains it better. It is important that the social news platform include a brief descriptions for every story if headings are not being displayed completely. This will make more sense to the reader and keep him looking for more.
• Easy to use Vote Boxes - A voting system is important for any social news website but sometimes these voting buttons don’t do their jobs the way they should and end up ruining the experience. A smooth voting system which doesn’t reload the page every time a new vote is cast must be used by all social news websites. Also, the voting buttons must not interfere with the rest of the design and vice-versa.
• Pagination - The basic purpose of Social News Websites is to collect fresh news from multiple sources and showcase it all on its homepage. These sources are so many in number that the homepage tends to be too small to showcase all the collected news. This is when pagination comes into play. The bottom of the homepage must have links to other pages in order so that older news can be access easily. Also, these pagination buttons must be smoothly blended with design so that they don’t kill the experience.
• Comments and Discussions - These are an integral part of Social News Website Design and a reason why users stick around for longer periods. Designers should be careful while designing the comments section as overdone comments section can be a serious turn off for users.
• Profiles - Social Networking has become trendy and having a community system of your own is really very fancy. This is when a profile system for users on a social news website can really add up to the user base of that website. Users indulge in creating profiles and showing of content which they have been reading on that particular social news website which indirectly benefits the social news website.
• Groups - A social networking platform without groups is almost meaningless. Groups helps users to indulge in discussions and invite more friends to those discussions. Such activities help the website concerned and StumbleUpon is one social news website that has utilized the concept of groups at its best.

Now, let us quickly go through some of the in-business social news websites that we have been appreciated for a long time.

Reddit

Reddit is one of the few social news websites that has survived all competition. Go to the homepage of Reddit and the number of votes or comments that an article on the homepage gets are enough to explain the traffic that this social news website will generate for a link that tops its homepage. Reddit was created to focus particularly on the headlines which is why it is sticking around. The focus on stories was so important for the designers of Reddit that they minimized the size of everything else which helped the stories stand apart on every page of Reddit.

This content based minimal design helps the readers scan through most of the stories and find which is of interest to him. Reddit avoids description fields which is why more number of stories show up on the homepage increasing the chances to webmasters to dream of extra traffics. Reddit features a random Sponsored Section on the top of the homepage which is almost similar to the rest of the homepage except that the background color is different. Such sections helps Reddit pay its bills (and probably pocket away a bit which is perfectly alright).

I have been referring to Reddit for ages and it looks like I will continue to do so for many more years to come.

Slashdot

Slashdot is a technology focused social news website where users initiate discussions and share its stories. Slashdot has been famous for its inspirational discussions on open source software movements. Stories are more or less related to the big guns like Microsoft, Apple etc. Slashdot has also been famous for its Gadget based review and book reviews. Such stories have always found a place on Slahsdot.

Like any other social news website Slashdot gives users the options to categorize the stories and start discussions on the same. Slashdot is one of the few social news website designs that have done well to stick with its user base which are tech lovers or book lovers. It is mainly because of the quality of content that Slashdot continues to garner some of the best possible content on day to day basis on their homepage.

Design Newz

Now, let us discuss something about a design based social news website. Design  Newz is one of the few design based social news website which is famous for the quality of its content. Design Newz is based on hand picked content which is only shared after a lot of research.

Design Newz does not permit users to leave comments and vote for stories which can be a turn off, but the quality of content is enough for you to trust the stories that Design Newz generates. If you are a design lover the Design Newz is for you.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon took the world (and the websites featured on it) by storm. It crashed plenty of servers and made plenty of websites super famous. Sometimes the traffic that StumbleUpon generates isn’t completely relevant but the numbers are so pleasing that you will wish for repeated effects.

StumbleUpon has its own community system which helps users interact with each and create groups for relevant discussions. The website will send you notifications if you register for one thus keeping you updated with fresh links. Users can review and vote for various webpages which actually decides the fate of these pages. StumbleUpon’s biggest advantage is its toolbar which when integrated with your browser helps you find new content on the fly.

This is it. I don’t want to discuss Digg because it been discussed time and time again.

Conclusion

Social News Websites are here to stay as they are based on some of the simple trends that we saw above. New website might come and old might die down but the concept will continue to evolve as it is end user friendly. Let us know if you are aware of some more social news websites and your experiences with them.

Digg is one of the best and the biggest social network right now. If you know how to treat it, you can get amazing floods of traffic regularly. However using just their homepage and simple techniques always aren’t enough. Do you know what’s hot now, how many of your friends digg your stories, actual trends and many other analysis about Digg? These trends always continue to change so you need several tools to keep up. And this is place where this article comes handy – I carefully tested many tools and then selected the most usable ones I enjoyed and I hope this research will help you too. Also I am using Firefox, WordPress and Greasemonkey in regular basis, so on this list you will find a bunch of plugins and scripts too.

1.Digg Labs

The labs provide a broader (and deeper) view of Digg. A lot of stuff gets submitted to Digg every day, so good things can sometimes fly right past you. Labs projects look beneath the surface of the Digg community’s activities. Here you can find several tools to make browsing and digging more fun as well as analyze activities.

2. OriginalSignal

This site shows Digg RSS feed in much more handier way, you can also customize font size, view more headlines, change the order of weblogs or just grab RSS feed. Definitely spares unnecessary clicks.

3.Di66

Find out which are top words in titles, top words in descriptions, digg’s stats, top users, top sources. This website analyses statistics to let You understand who and what’s hot on Digg right now.

4.SocialBlade

Similar site like di66, but this one offer more detailed analysis, graphs and statistics allowing You to understand how many comments, diggs, friend diggs etc. are needed to hit digg front page. Analyze, what’s really happening on digg’s front page.

5.Digg Explorer v1.1

This is a tool for exploration of the 500 most popular recent stories from Digg. It uses small circles to represent items of interest which are fluidly positioned in various ways to emphasize patterns of interest. Version 1.1 adds a new graph of the top Users and also fixes a bug in the domain parsing logic.

6.Digg Top

DiggTop is an application for Windows and MacOSX that lets you view a blended list of your favourite Digg topic or keyword feeds. In addition to the full Digg submission information, it will also display a slideshow of images it can scrape from the linked article.

View video submissions from your favourite Digg video categories, and preview some videos right in the application. You can also set up keyword and Digg count filters that will notify you with a sound and icon when new stories match your criteria.

7.MiniDigg

A digg.com widget that allows you to view and track stories, track Your friend activity and the best of all is, this Adobe AIR application refreshes automatically, default refresh rate is 30sec, but You can change that.

8.Digg Alerter

This tools tracks your submitted stories informing with sound when story gets new digg, as well as comments and who dug your submission.

9.Feeddit

Feeddit is an improvement to the standard rss feed on Digg.com, it’s longer, fatter and more awesome. These new feeds are 100 stories long and has the actual link so you can skip past Digg and get directly to the story. This site lets you follow to digg front page even easier! Just subscribe and let the news come to you.

10.Neaveru Digg Comment Statistics

Fill in your Digg username right on their site to get statistics about your Digg commenting.

11.Digg Comment Viewer

Online application which lets you view all your Digg comments quickly and easily. It also can track your friend comments easily as well, several more options.

12.Digg Notify

Digg Notify is an application that pops up a small box in the bottom right hand side of your screen. It tells you when your story hits front page as well. The window never gains focus so it should not bother you. You can configure the minimum amount of diggs before the messages start coming. You can also configure the amount of stories it scans for. Once your story hits front page it will notify you of that and then ignore it so you don’t get swamped with messages. You also have the option of ignoring/unignoring certain stories.

13.Digg Friend Statistics

I just cannot explain how valuable this tool is. Must have – to let you evaluate some of your Digg friends or fans and some of them just remove.

Enter your Digg user name and this script will tell you which of your friends are digging your submissions – and which aren’t. DiggStatistics.com will analyze your Digg friends list and tell you which of your friends have dugg the last 10 of your digg submissions, and which of your friends have not. It will also tell you which users in the digg community other than your friends have dugg more than five of your submissions.

14.The Digg Oracle

This tool lets you find already long time ago dugg stories – useful if you use Digg as bookmarking tool.

Why not just go to Digg.com and search?

Digg no longer allows you to perform searches on your voting history. Many people use Digg as a bookmarking tool, and thus intend to reference back to specific articles. There may be thousands of stories on the same topic, not all will contain the same content as the story you are looking for.

15. DiggLicious

Digglicious.com is a mashup of three fantastic websites; digg.com, del.icio.us and reddit.com.This site combines information from these three sites to provide lists of items that are being dugg, items that are being bookmarked on del.icio.us, and items moving up the homepage of reddit.com. The main page uses AJAX to show activity for the sites.

16. DiggWatcher

This simple Flash app is designed to run in the background and monitor a Digg story of your choice. It will alert you with sound upon receiving new diggs, new comments, and becoming popular.

Firefox Extensions

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17. Smart Digg Button 1.01

The Smart Digg Button is simple Firefox extension which allows you to see whether or not the web page you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg and lets you submit it if it hasn’t.

Unfortunately not yet compatible with latest Firefox version.

18. The Digg Toolbar

The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you’re not on the Digg site itself. With a notification window built into the toolbar, you’ll never miss a popular story or when friends Digg, submit, or comment on stories.

I am pretty big fan about this extension, it’s similar like Smart Digg button, but this one offers more options. However if You don’t need them, I’ll suggest previous extension.

19. TADSEE

The Anti-Digg/Slashdot Effect Extension provides, in the right-click context menu, options to open the Coral/Google cache versions of a link in a new tab.

20. Socialphile

Socialphile Firefox Extension assists users with comfortable searching based on ranking of each search result at social news websites like Digg.com

21. Digg Sidebar

Shows the Digg stories in real time in the Firefox sidebar.

Greasemonkey scripts

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Download Greasemonkey Firefox plugin

22.Digg.com shorturl remover ( Greasemonkey script)

Digg.com direct url in front page – I enjoy this script, because usually I digg stories and if I want to bookmark them, I click through and get digg link. This scripts practically saves You one click through.

23.Digg Button Animation Enabler

Enables the animation when pressing the digg button on an article that includes one, so you can digg it and keep reading.

24.Google reader digg news

Adds a digg control to every news-item in google reader

25.Digg Rating Extender

A greasemonkey script (for Firefox) to show the digg ups and digg downs on digg stories. Here’s a picture of what it looks like:

26.Digg – Add mirrors

Adds links to rorr.im, Coral Cache, DuggBack and Archive.org wayback machine to every story. What separates this from the rest is that it’s better integrated with digg: it’s displayed beneath every digg-button.

WordPress Plugins

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27. Digg Digg

Integrate “Digg Button” , “Reddit Me Button” , “Dzone Button” and “Yahoo Buzz Button” Into WordPress Content. Setup screen provided to let user choose where user want to display Digg , Reddit , Dzone and Yahoo Buzz buttons. I am using this plugin on my very own site.

28. diggZ-Et – digg WordPress Plugin

diggZ-Et is a digg WordPress plugin that automatically displays a “digg” button for each post/page, with several admin settings so you can customize as you need.

29. WP Digg This

WP Digg This is a plugin that adds a Digg button, but with a twist. Instead of adding a Digg button to all your posts, WP Digg This plugin selectively adds the button only to posts you want.

30. Digg widget

Displays your past 10 dugg stories and make it a widget.

However feel free to add your foundings too, maybe I missed something?