Big Spy

Digg is a site that allows members to post links to interesting articles for others to vote on. If someone likes an article, they "Digg" it and vote it more popular. The articles that get the most Diggs end up on the front page of the site. The site is mostly geared toward technology articles (and those that are of interest to techno-geeks).

One of the other things that's neat about the site is it's recent addition of visualization tools. The tools (Stack, Swarm, Big Spy and Arc) are fun to watch. As each transaction occurs on the Digg site, a graphical representation is displayed on the visualization screen. With Big Spy, each article title gets inserted into the top of a falling tower as someone Diggs it, moving the other titles down in the stack. Much like Tag Clouds (see the one on the right side of my site) that change the font size of the tags depending on their frequency of use, Big Spy changes the font size based on the relative number of Diggs each article has received. More popular articles are in a much larger font that newer, or less popular titles.

It's a good way to stay on top of some techno-news, or just watch the visualization.