Over the last few months, we have been not-so-secretly preparing to introduce community and conversation back to Digg, and we are finally ready to pull back the proverbial curtain …
Dialog is a thoughtful, live conversation between the Digg community and the people who make the best stuff on the Internet.
Digg’s Superstar Editors discover and feature a lot of incredible articles, written by awesome journalists, about amazing people. And we’ve always thought: “Wouldn’t it be great to talk about these articles with the journalists who wrote them, or the people they’re about?” And it turns out, Digg users also really, really want to talk about them, while journalists are clamoring for a well-lit place to share more about their work.
Here’s how Digg Dialog works: When we discover and feature an exceptional article (or video), we will invite the journalist or an expert to come talk with Digg’s community. If they accept, we will schedule a Dialog and post the time and guest on our homepage. A few hours before our guest arrives, the Dialog page will go online, and you will be able to start posting questions.
Once our guest joins, the conversation will officially go live, and we expect it to be fascinating, entertaining, spirited, and civil. After the guest leaves, the Dialog page will stay open so you can continue your discussions and debates with other community members. When the conversation dies down (or when the moderators feel it’s time), the Dialog will be closed, but the page will stay accessible (forever!) so you can relive and share your discussions.
We have focused on features that will allow that most engaging and interesting conversations. Here are a few things that we think you’ll notice and love:
• It’s LIVE! - We built Dialog to feel like a live chat instead of static commenting, and you’ll notice it immediately. As the conversation is going on, new questions and responses will pop into your thread in real-time, no page refresh required. We think it’s going to create a truly free-flowing and dynamic experience. Hope you like it!
• Multiple Views - Dialog comes in three different views: “Live” (real-time and chronological), “Answered” (questions answered by our guest), and “Most Dugg” (questions and responses that the community diggs the most). After testing a lot of different views, we found these three to be the best for following a live conversation, and the easiest to read afterwards. All three options will remain available even after the Dialog closes.
• Creators and Experts - For our guest lineup, we’ll be focusing on people that have created great content and have something outstanding to share with you, so you’ll be meeting some amazing journalists and authors. We will also sprinkle in a few persons-of-interest, especially those who have been profiled in an article or video, or are experts in a topic that has been featured on Digg. Most Q&A products out there cater to people who are promoting a new movie, TV show, album, pet, or underwear line. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but we wanted to offer something different.
• Best Community - We believe in the quality and depth of Digg’s community, especially after so many of you told us how much you care about great conversations. To be honest, we know that it’s hard to build and manage a good commenting platform, and we’ve been watching as some of our favorite publishers have shut down theirs over the last few months. But with your help and feedback, we were able to create Digg’s Community Guidelines that match our shared expectations of quality and intent. And to start, we’re going to be pre-moderating Dialog to ensure that the conversations are interesting, thought-provoking, and civil.
• Cross-platform - Who are we to restrict where you have your conversations? We’ve built Dialog to work on web, mobile web, and in our new iOS App, which will be live in the App Store shortly. And for our Android App users (of which I am one), we’re working on it, and hope to have some good news soon.
When Can I Join The Conversation?
Our first Digg Dialog will be Friday, October 9 at 12pm EST, and our very first guest will be the inimitable Paul Ford. Make sure to read his latest article about Wikipedia from the New Republic, and join us tomorrow on the frontpage to talk about it.
We have really loved building Dialog, and have worked with our world-class launch partners (big and small, see below) to bring you something we’re really proud of. Come have a conversation with us!
