WebProNews

The online service where users vote, or digg', news stories to move them up in the rankings has received funding from Omidyar Network.

The co-founders of Netscape and eBay have placed a significant bit of coin in Digg's coffers. The Mercury News reported how venture capital from Omidyar Network has been plowed into the company.

Currently, Digg focuses on technology news. Users submit news stories, and other users vote by giving them a "digg." As stories accumulate diggs they travel up the site. The concept has definitely caught on; Digg gets 500,000 visitors a day.

The system for adding stories uses captcha technology to try and foil spammers and others trying to game the system. Each story also carries a "problem" link where users can select an issue they encountered and report it.

Digg's software tries to make users aware of duplicate stories when posting a story. Complying with that warning is voluntary, which works because a second story on a topic may be better than the first one.

Google News has garnered a following by gathering stories organized by topics, but an algorithm drives that process rather than users. In turn, Google News has been tweaked enough that only the most powerful news sources come to dominate topics, even when better stories from lesser sources may exist.

That's why a 100-word piece appearing on the Los Angeles Times web site will sit atop a topic in Google News while a lengthier and more useful 500-word report gets buried in the rankings for that topic.

Yahoo News has tried to balance that mechanistic approach by making results from blogs on a news search topic available alongside results from formal news sources. Currently in beta, Yahoo has restricted the number of blogs used as news sources while it tests the service.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.