Digg.com

For some time now there has been an explosion in social media – MySpace and Facebook are well established and are in fact bigger than many countries in terms of membership.

Another growing trend is the concept of social news gathering. We all come across interesting websites from time to time and send the link around to our friends. Social news gathering is the same idea, and one of the first of such sites is www.digg.com.
The idea behind Digg is that users submit links with a summary to digg.com and other users vote or ‘digg’ the story to the front page.

In reality it is more complicated – algorithms are used to speed up the process, but you end up with a fascinating news/trivia service well worth a look.

Recently Digg launched a new service called the Digg Bar. Simply put digg.com/ before any web address and you will see a toolbar at the top of your browser window that creates a shortened URL, allowing you to submit stories to Digg as well as share the page via email, Facebook and Twitter.