Digg.com has just received  $2.8m in venture capital funding from Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape pioneer Marc Andreessen and Greylock partners.

Just the two first names should tell you that this is a company to watch. I've called Digg a Slashdot killer before, and I still stand by that assertion.

The site uses a voting mechanism (a vote is called a "digg") that allows its visitors to pick which stories should be on the front page.

The service has plenty of bugs to work out – currently the majority of stories on the front page are in the "man bites dog" or "20 cool wall papers for your desktop" category, that personally I couldn't care less about. But you can't argue with the masses. They will also face ever more Digg Spam – site cheating their way to the front page by recruiting a group of people to dig their own stories.

Digg's value lies in the fact that it allows for the smallest of blogs to reach a massive audience – 500,000 per day for Digg.com at this moment, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Of those 80,000 are registered users who are able to 'Digg' stories.

Digg's background is foggy – the site is a project of Kevin Rose, formerly of TechTV.

Tags: pierre omidyar, marc andreessen, greylock partners, kevin rose, digg

28 Oct 2005