The podcasts section experiment started almost two years ago. At the time, podcasts were relatively new and we saw them as a unique medium – different enough from audio or video to warrant a separate and custom-designed section of the site. That section was developed to differentiate between each ‘episode’ and the parent ‘show’, which could be ranked over a long period of time. Unfortunately, as we all learned, the podcasts section stagnated because the top shows dominated and there was little activity. This shortcoming is one reason that the podcasts section is used by less than a thousand people on a regular basis.

The podcast section has been rolled into the videos section, but what about Digg Spy?

Digg Spy is a feature that lets users view user activity as it happens, which once let users discover new content and other users as they were active. "As Digg grew, Digg Spy became less and less representative of the breadth of activity on the site," says Burka. "We began showing ever-smaller percentages of the activity on the site in order to keep the stream from becoming a blur. Thus, Digg Spy became less informative."

They still have a feature that they later added to Digg Labs called Big Spy (pictured above), which is basically a bigger and better version of Digg Spy, which pretty much rendered it useless, hence its pending removal.

Look for Digg to do away with these features over the next week or so. Will they be missed? I can’t say I used either much, but how about you?