Digg.com is one of the hot properties in the world of Web 2.0 with it's user-driven news system that attempts to bring the most popular and relevant stories to the top.  In theory, this helps separate the signal from the noise in the world of online news, but the reality doesn't match up very well.  Much of what does make it onto the Digg front page is garbage (there's a Paris Hilton story up right now), but the concept is extremely interesting since it has developed such a ridiculously large community and following.  It's to tech nuts today, what Slashdot was to them 4 years ago.

The site works by taking user-submitted content, and then lets other users essentially vote on what they feel is interesting by "Digging" the story.  Stories with more "diggs" climb up the ranks of the site, and if you get enough quick enough, you make it to the front page of the site.  Basically, the more popular you are, the more popular you get because more people see your story.  And a lot of people digg a lot of stories, resulting in a pretty constant stream of change on the index. 

Now, there's all this data moving around on the back-end that you never see, all you see is the end-result.  Well, Digg has some visualization tools they've begun to share with the public.  One of which is a really nifty tool called "Stack"  What Stack does is line up 100 stories along the long axis of a chart, with the height and color of the bar showing how many "diggs" it has received.  As users digg an item, in real-time, a dot drops from the top of the window onto the "stack" for the story.  You can watch as stories gain or lose popularity relative to other content on the site.  In the world of Web 2.0 and the emphasis on user interaction and the intelligence of crowds, this visualization is a very interesting one to watch.

Plus, the graph is pretty and it looks like it's snowing when you watch the Most Popular set.