Digg Burrows Down a New Path

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"News just happens to be what we started with," he says, adding that the company will expand into any area "where there is an overwhelming amount of information out there and sifting through it has been a problem."

"Mystream" Downside

What is there an abundance of on the Web? Entertainment content is one area Digg may move into. Given that the site just launched major categories for podcasts and videos, it wouldn't be farfetched to assume that Digg's near future will include more entertaining video clips or fun podcasts—all of it for review and critique by the Digg community. The top 10 most viewed submissions could soon look very different from the list of news articles now on the site.

The danger for Digg and sites like it is that the influx of new users and new types of content could alienate the core users who rely on Digg for hard news. Sure, they can personalize their page to reflect their penchant for breaking stories. But too much personalization, in order to avoid unwanted stories, could result in users missing out on the kinds of hard news stories they awake to now when they view the top stories on Digg. In a November post, venture capitalist Jeff Nolan wrote in his blog that he was finished with Digg. "I'm just not getting anything out of it anymore."

Christine Tatum, national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and assistant business editor at The Denver Post, says the move from "mainstream to mystream," popular with user-generated and social-networking sites, is bound to keep people from being exposed to necessary information outside the realm of their favorite topics. "The chief danger here is that, by striving for personalization, people are weeding out a lot of information that everybody should be exposed to."

Web Republic

Of course, that's less of a problem if Digg is just one of several sources of news that people rely on to get their information. Adelson says he reads the newspaper in the mornings for some types of news and also gets information from Digg. However, for some people, news-aggregator sites such as the Digg community will be their primary source of news—if they are not already.

As Digg embraces more entertainment content, other upstarts are poised to steal its news audience. Techmeme and Tailrank, for example, use formulas that give preference to the stories most blogged about in order to highlight the news most likely to be fresh and interesting. Techmeme monitors 1,000 sources, such as highly trafficked industry blogs, and then uses an algorithm to select the top stories mentioned by those blogs. "If something is linked by the right people fast enough, it is a signal to my system that they see the thing they are linking to as having news value," says Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera. Tailrank does something similar, monitoring 160,000 blogs every half hour. Tailrank CEO and founder Kevin Burton says he opted for an algorithm, rather than public votes, to focus on news.

Techmeme and Tailrank have significantly less traffic than Digg. Techmeme is among the top 5,000 sites and Tailrank is in the top 11,700, according to Alexa. Digg, on the other hand, is the 78th most popular site on the Web.

Both Burton and Rivera say that bloggers, because they rely on their reputations to attract traffic, are less willing than the general public to promote stories that are simply sensational or offbeat. "If the community finds something funny on Digg, they will vote it up," says Burton. "But if I am at work and I want a real news site, I don't want to see that."

Clearly, many others do want to see that. That's why they are digging it. It's also why the founding fathers made America a republic.

Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York .