Digg founder Kevin Rose has confirmed that the social news site will launch new verticals in the next month or so. The expansion has been common knowledge since late 2005, but until now there was no timescale. At the eBay Developers Conference in Las Vegas, he explained that the new topic areas would include world news, entertainment and politics. The site will also be redesigned.
This is an interesting development, but it's not yet clear whether the site's popularity will carry over to other subjects. Was Digg's success down to the passionate nature of tech users and Kevin's star power, or is this a model that can work elsewhere? The latest crop of memediggers are certainly struggling, but Digg has some major advantages: huge reach, "Digg-this" buttons on thousands of blogs and more advanced spam filtering than anyone else. A politics vertical could certainly take off (imagine the competition between the Democrats and Republicans to get favorable stories to the top), and an entertainment site/section would be a good way to take the concept mainstream. All in all, I'm cautiously optimistic on this one.