Digg Newsroom makes Debut

The social media site Digg.com opened its new feature to the public Thursday: Digg Newsroom.

Digg.com is a social new site launched in 2004. Users submit links to the site in different categories, and other users have the ability to vote (digg) for the stories, and the most popular stories are promoted onto Digg's homepage. Categories include technology, gaming, sports, celebrates, entertainment and much more. Diggers can also have friends and followers and there are other standard social networking features.

Here is how Digg's CEO, Matt Williams, described the problem Digg Newsroom is trying to solve:

The online world is flooded with information. The volume of news published on a daily basis has grown exponentially. Many of us visit several different sites each day to get the most relevant or entertaining information on the topics we care about. There has never been a better time to separate the news from the noise.

Digg Newsroom tackles that problem with a three step process. The Newsroom collects stores from Digg's real-time news feed, newswire, and arranges the content according to the Newsroom algorithm. The algorithm uses other Internet chatter, such as how many people are liking the stories on Facebook or tweeting the article among other factors. Then digg users can vote for and against stories they see on the newsroom. More active Diggers' opinions carry more weight on what is relevant and what isn't also. Then the stories enter into Digg's normal news stream.

Williams said the new tool is meant to help diggers separate meaningful stories from popular ones. The philosophy goes that some stories like hottest women of 2011 may be popular, they are not as meaningful as exposés on political corruption.

The service also gives users badges to mark certain achievements. A Digger would get the Ace Reporter badge for submitting a story that makes it to the front page. No doubt this feature is at least somewhat inspired by Xbox's Achievement system that reward's players with points for accomplishing certain goals.

The Newsroom page is also more graphical with more of a modern design. The rest of the site's looks haven't change much from it's launch, and may start to look a bit dated to some users as Internet design techniques evolve on the Web.