How frustrating is it to find good news on the Web these days? Every news organization with a Web site (and at this point that would be almost all of them) seems to be reporting on the same 3-5
stories every day--original reporting is now a hard thing to come by indeed. That's more or less the idea behind Digg.com, a tech-news community site that lets readers recommend good articles to
others. Digg.com challenges the old media notion that editors know best what consumers want to read--and it's quickly become the third-most-visited Web site dedicated to technology news, according to
Hitwise--up from 8th last year (it's only 18 months old). Digg.com, which attracted as many as 8.5 million users in May, is set to roll out an upgrade on Monday. To "digg" on the site literally means
to vote, so the articles appear in order of coolness. "The point of Digg is to capture the interests of the Internet masses and use that interest to help organize the huge amounts of information on
the Web," Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson said in an interview. Hmm. Sounds like Google...While organizing articles in this manner is both fast and convenient, it requires significant usage. Digg.com
certainly gets a ton of traffic, but it doesn't seem like that traffic cares enough to vote. For example, the average article for "Internet advertising" received 5-7 votes--not enough for the ratings
factor to really be a factor.
Read the whole story at Reuters.com »
