I always wondered what do people in different parts of the Internet are interested in. The advent of Web2.0 and People News Production websites made it possible to answer the question. All you need is to study an appropriate website during some period and then to draw a conclusion.
Let's start with Digg.com
It's not a secret that Digg is a technological site. Most links that are posted there concern technology. That's why I only analyzed Technology section completely ignoring other ones.
Digg Technology section contains the following topics: Apple, Design, Gadgets, Hardware, Industry News, Linux/Unix, Mods, Programming, Security, Software, Tech Deals. 11 topics in all.
It was rather simple to calculate topics which are in popular demand: I took top 10 recently popular links and gave estimate from 1-10 points to the appropriate link topic, depending on the position in the Top 10 chart. And all that within 4 weeks, twice a day.
As you can see, the most popular topic with double breakaway from the next rival is Tech Industry News. Tech Deals and Mods bring up the rear.
Popularity of the above mentioned topics looks in the following way:
As expected, diggers are mostly interested in tech news - such as acquiring of the YouTube by Google, AMD growing sales or another monopoly scandal concerning Microsoft.
We can also observe a steady interest in Apple and Software. Regarding Apple everything is quite clear, but the biggest part of Software related links deals with web-oriented applications. For example, during the period of Digg observation, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 major releases took place. As a result the Software topic received great amount of popularity points.
Design unexpectedly occupied the 4th place, and that was a real surprise for me. It turned out that diggers are more interested in CSS tricks and hidden abilities of Photoshop than in WinXP migration on Ubuntu or in another Linux Red Hat release. And I was also surprised that Linux/Unix topic has only taken 5th place.
One more thing that I'd like to show you is how the interest changes from one to another appropriate topic during the week. Let's see the graph:
So as you can see Tech Industry News line is less popular at the weekends because of the lack of the news. We can also notice some slight decline in the graph of Software line at the end of the week. But interest in Apple and Linux/Unix is steady. Moreover, interest in Design grows at the weekends. Maybe diggers prefer some creative pastime at weekends :) In addition, Gadgets topic which remains unconcerned during the week-days perks up at the weekend.
That's all what I've got to say at the moment. Come back later to check for other websites I've observed.
