Digg makes use of new image section with flashy new visualization

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm a sucker for pretty-looking things. It helps when they're actually useful, too. In the case of most items in Digg's labs section, the latter can't often be said, but they're certainly fun to look at. Today Digg launched a new visualization called "pics," which is a new way to see what pictures people are digging in real time. The new feature coincides with the enhancement of a pictures section, and recategorization, which took place earlier this month.

Each category on Digg gets its own section, and photos from each story show up every time they're dugg. You can see right away which stories are hot, just like you could with any other Digg visualization, but in the case of pics, you can actually look at the picture without even having to open up the story. The page also has keyboard shortcuts set up to let you traverse the landscape of stories with your arrow keys.

Like all other Digg labs projects, the visualization was made by the Web 2.0 heartthrob studio Stamen Design, which built out Trulia's real estate visualizations, Twitter Explore, and the (now-defunct) Oakland crime maps.