Exciting new update to Digg Labs today. Thanks to the hard work of stamen design and support from Intel, we’re launching a new animation, Digg Arc. While the other animations in Labs are at the story level, Arc is the first app that provides a view of Digging activity at the topic and subtopic-level. Presented as a circle, Arc shows the most recently Dugg stories on the outside of the circle, with width indicating the relative popularity of that story against its peers. The middle ring is the sub-topic for the stories and the inner ring represents the topic. As new stories are Dugg, the story, sub-topic, and topic are highlighted with a quick flash.
Arc gets its name because of the lines that connect stories on the outside of the circle. These show when the same user has Dugg two different stories, highlighting connections between stories across different topics. We think this is a great way to discover new stories across topics because it’s so easy to see connections between them.
Visually, Arc is more dynamic than our other visualizations. Rather than moving pre-rendered pieces, enormous sections of the screen are being redrawn every frame. There is less caching, resulting in more complete motion within the animation. This can be seen as the shape and position of arcs change over time, as well as how the animation scales dynamically to fit the size of your browser or screen. Because of these relatively advanced features, Arc requires Flash 9.
Lastly, users can right-click to select the a full-screen view of the visualization rather than viewing it in the browser. We’re also making downloadable versions of Arc available since we’ve gotten feedback from many of you that you want to be able to run Labs animations as standalone apps.
We’re excited to have Intel as our first partner in Labs and want to thank them and stamen design for helping us develop Arc.
As always, you stay classy internet, Daniel
