by Anthony Feint

Created on: January 27, 2009

Digg.com is a social news website founded by Kevin Rose. Unlike traditional news sites, Digg uses the power of the community to sort through and promote news. And with over 2.2 million users, Digg manages to unearth (or dig) up a great variety of news stories on a wide range of subjects.

The concept is simple, if you like a news story you "digg" it. Each Digg is effectively a vote for that story. The more diggs a story has the higher it will be displayed the website.

Having a story displayed on the front page of Digg is a huge bonus for the author or site owner. Digg can send through thousands of visitors to a website if their story becomes popular, and this has crashed many a site or blog. This phenomenom is now lovingly known as the "digg effect". Few Digg like services can lay claim to the ability of bringing down servers - Digg does this on a daily basis.

The Digg community is highly active, selective, picky and sometimes even rude. In fact, the comment stream on each popular news story is usually the home of a major debate with heated arguments, insults and in depth analysis. The community has also been known to rebel against the site itself and is always very vocal when changes are made to there beloved site. Expect the community to also be extremely biased on political and tech topics.

Digg provides a fairly large selection of categorie in which stories are organized, yet there is a definite "tech" feeling about the site. Homepage stories more often than not include a technology focus, yet a little digging through the other categories with result in wide ranging selection of news and other stories.

Digg.com doesn't cover breaking news in the same way as a site such as Google News does, but it does provide a quirky and offbeat experience and is certainly a great way to kill some time. With such a large userbase, the sheer amount of content on Digg is staggering and no clone or copycat service has managed to even come close to what Digg is achieving.

Digg does have some issues with spam, but the majority of it is simply buried by the community. Gaming the system is also a common problem but Digg has been aggressive in banning users it believes are using the site unfairly.

With Kevin Rose at the helm, we can be sure that the site will continue to improve. Changes to the algorythms are always happening and making the site even more effective.

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