Social News Site Lets Users ‘Digg’ Into Non-Tech News

Digg.com, a user-driven technology news site that lets its readers select which stories are the most relevant at a given time, on Thursday said it is expanding its content to include general, mainstream news like entertainment articles and videos, Reuters reports.

In the year and a half since San Francisco-based Digg.com’s inception on the Web, it has become one of the most often-visited technology news sites on the Internet, according to Reuters. With some 304,000 registered users, Digg is the third-ranked U.S. technology news site, based on page impressions, according to research from Hitwise, Reuters reports.

Digg has already sent a wave of unease through the traditional Web and print news communities as it challenges the idea that editors know better than anyone what readers want, and the new, expanded Digg, which Reuters reports is expected to be available on Monday, is sure to further shake up the industry.

Jay Adelson, Digg chief executive, said, “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. This makes it more convenient and, frankly, faster to find relevant information,” according to Reuters.

When Digg readers vote for a story, or “digg” it, the piece slowly rises to the top of its page, in a user-influenced system that is not unlike Google’s algorithm-driven page-ranking system, Reuters reports.

Just last week, AOL made available a new version of its Netscape site that offers a similar service to Digg’s, in an attempt to capitalize on the site’s recent spike in popularity.

The first non-tech related videos to be made available on Digg will be from YouTube, MySpace, Google Video and Yahoo Video, and the “social news site” also plans to add a sports section in the near future, according to Reuters.

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