• by June 26, 2006

An interesting development last week, as Digg.com, a destination for tech-news junkies, said it will enable users to vote for the most popular general news, entertainment stories, or videos. Digg already enables users to recommend stories to friends. The move is notable because it assumes that editors, the people who make judgment calls on news, aren't the ultimate arbiters of news so much anymore. Certainly not in the new world of consumer-generated content.

Digg ranks as the third-most-visited U.S. site dedicated to technology news, up from No. 8 late last year, according to Hitwise. Digg has 304,000 registered users, but attracted 8.5 million visitors in May. Digg's moves, due out today, may further disrupt the news business which is already a mess given audience fragmentation, blogs and other consumer-generated media, and new technologies.

The premise of Digg is that the more readers who "digg," or vote for, a story, the farther it rises up the rankings of the site. Digg's process enables the masses to determine what gets played as "news." That's radical. Readers influence one another's choices. Tastemakers influence us all.

Digg says online videos on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, and Yahoo Video will be the first of a variety of non-news categories that they plan to allow users to vote on.