Where's the Art in Digg 3.0?

The wonderful folks at Digg recently expanded their social-bookmarking categories beyond the technology realm, and yesterday they announced that they will be adding a sports category as well as new Flash-enabled ways to visually map postings. Is this a good time to ask why the Digg universe, which now covers world news, business stories, and all manner of "entertainment" coverage in addition to 11 technology-related categories, doesn't have a category for art?

Social-bookmarking competitor del.icio.us currently has over 260,000 items in its database that have been tagged "art" by its users; the closest you can come on Digg to sharing information about art is to atomize it into only marginally relevant topics (I recently posted an art story, with a cringe, under "Design"), and a search for "art" itself turns up every smARTphone and depARTment in their massive information warehouse.

Digg's insistence that the site's Technology news continue as the site's landing page, combined with the kinds of categories they have chosen to add, look like YouTube envy to me - an eagerness to reach out to the world beyond their technology roots and build on their massive surge in user interest with a few populist cherries - "Celebrities," "TV," and soon "Sports" as well - but with an underlying discomfort with reshaping their identity in the process. But if Digg intends to compete with the user-tagging model of del.icio.us with a Web 1.0, AOL-style category structure, the least they could do is acknowledge one of the most interesting areas of our collective lives with a category of its own, one that puts all of our technology, entertainment, design, programming, celebrities, movies, and world news in perspective. Art? Let them eat gadgets!