LA Times: Digg, not Drudge, is the top dog in online news

The LA Times writes today that the "user-powered" community website Digg.com has overtaken The Drudge Report as the defacto source for news online. "For years," Richard Rushfield writes for the Times, "if a news story broke in the woods and Drudge didn't link to it, it didn't break."

But now, the landscape of the Internet has changed dramatically and Digg.com has become "the czar of social news," supplanting Drudge as the top news source on the Internet. Unfortunately, Digg.com's automated algorithm, which tabulates user votes to determine the top stories of each day, may be at risk for cheating, or "gaming," the article warns. That, however, hasn't seemed to stop its continued growth.

According to Alexa.com data, Digg.com overtook The Drudge Report in terms of traffic in mid-April of 2006 and has maintained a solid lead since then. Drudge's traffic has been on a slow but steady decline since about the same time.

Excerpts from Times article below:

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SINCE the dawn of the Internet, one site has reigned over all others as the Web's official rounder-upper of the day's news: the Drudge Report. As anyone who works at a news website can tell you, the best driver of viewers to one of your stories is a link on Drudge. The second-best way is — there is no second-best way. For years, if a news story broke in the woods and Drudge didn't link to it, it didn't break.

Many, including such otherwise favored Web tycoons as Arianna Huffington and Gawker media's Nick Denton, have launched sites positioned as rivals to Drudge, but none has made a dent — until now. Welcome to Digg.com, the czar of social news — a kind of cross-pollination of Drudge and MySpace. The site's main function is fairly straightforward: Users post links on the Digg site to news stories. Other users look at the story and vote to either raise it up to the top of the site or bury it at the bottom.

Visitors are greeted with the prestigious "Newly Popular" page — a list of fairly recent stories that have received a lot of votes from users. And the page is extremely popular. The problem? The Web was rife with suggestions that Digg was being "gamed"; that groups and individuals were teaming up to artificially raise articles' standings on the page. Reports circulated with tales of co-ops who would, at the signal from one of their members, log on and vote for an article, of users (as seen in the YouTube wars) with multiple fake accounts and paid virtual sweatshops of users on call to drive up an article.

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READ THE FULL LA TIMES ARTICLE HERE

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