"Few would dispute that we live in an age of information overload. In the last few years alone, blogs have increased the torrent of information each day to unmanageable levels.  This would explain, then, why a corresponding torrent of startups has surfaced recently to help us filter, manage, and control this flood of information. Some rely on insightful algorithms that understand popularity to filter the news, while others rely on the preferences of readers.

For example, Digg is a San Francisco startup that ranks news items by letting people choose which stories they like. It just landed $2.8 million in venture capital from Omidyar Network, former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock Partners. We also understand that a comparable site -- Memeorandum -- may close a round of financing shortly.

The concept of making users prioritize or create hierarchies for news is not new -- Slashdot has been doing it since 1997. But the latest generation of sites like Digg and Memeorandum are showing that user-prioritized news is, indeed, a powerful and easy way to drive traffic -- in some cases to a site created by a single employee with a lone server."