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User-contributed news site Digg has entered experimental territory, as founder Kevin Rose disclosed the debut of Digg Labs.

A couple of projects call Digg Stack and Digg Swarm arrived online, as Rose revealed the Digg Labs today. (No sign of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew or Beaker, though. Or humorous lab disasters.)

The alpha aspect of the launch has evidently been giving the Digg crew some fits though. The site displayed a message that "Due to high load, some pages on Digg Labs may not display correctly and you might get some errors. We're working on it. Thanks for your patience."

Both new tools provide visualization methods that show activity on Digg. Stamen Design, which collaborated with Digg on creating the Labs, explained them on his blog:

Digg Stack shows diggs occurring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. As stories are dugg, they appear along the bottom of the screen, colored according to how popular they are. Users digging these stories appear as falling blocks that stack up as activity increases.

Digg Swarm is a more lyrical view of Digg. Stories come in as circles with the title inside of them, and diggers "swarm" around these stories when they digg them. Every time a story gets dugg, it increases in size - so the bigger the story, the more active it is.
Those viewing the Digg Swarm may notice a large number of diggers moving from story to story. This may be happening when groups vote for stories without actually reading them.

At some point in the future, Digg Labs could release a public API. The popularity of Digg along with the growth in developers creating mashups should ensure a number of projects using that API will crop up not long after it is released.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.