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That sense that Digg visitors will get something different from the sober sameness of conventional media is the attraction, he says. "I think one of the most interesting things about Digg, and why people come back time and time again, is ... that raw feel and raw nature of the site. You never know what you're going to see on the front page.... You can see two stories back to back that no sane editor would have ever placed there."

"I think people will flock to sites like Digg to supplement their traditional news diets," writes JD Lasica, cofounder and head of Ourmedia.org, in an e-mail. Ourmedia lets visitors post and share their original videos, photos, artwork, and writing.

"Digg started on a shoestring a year and a half ago, and it's astonishing how popular it's become in such a short time," writes Mr. Lasica, a former editor at the Sacramento Bee who now writes about online media. "Like most big ideas, it starts with a 'duh' realization – that users want to be part of the editorial process, and that readers want to see news stories from a wide range of sources." It's all about bringing the audience into the conversation, he notes. "Like it or not, most people just want to read a story and don't really care which news organization first reported it."

Digg's 360,000 registered users recommend more than 4,000 stories a day from traditional news sources, bloggers, and basically anything else they find on the Net that interests them. Digg's tiny staff of 15 don't act as editors, fulfilling Rose's philosophy that the site be "100 percent user-driven." Digg is "constantly tweaking" its algorithm to make the rankings more accurate, Rose says, to prevent anyone from "gaming" the system and artificially pushing a story to the top of the rankings.

The question now is whether casual online news seekers will flock to a user-run model that so far has appealed only to a technology-literate crowd. A casual user who just checks e-mail and the headlines at a big news site like CNN.com "might not get [Digg or Newsvine] as quickly," Davidson says. "It's not immediately obvious that something like this can work. People have been used to getting their news through the lens of an editor for so long that when they see something like this they almost don't know what to make of it."

Last year, the Los Angeles Times briefly allowed online readers to write and edit editorials. The newspaper had to quickly curtail its experiment when obscene writing and photos flooded the website.

But that hasn't kept reader input from becoming the mantra of newspapers today. While they may not be ready to turn all editorial decisions over to visitors, they are making their websites more responsive.

Many "old media" sites display a list of the stories most e-mailed to others. Some ask readers to rate the stories or let them add comments. The New York Times home page, for example, shows visitors lists of the stories most e-mailed, the stories most linked to by blogs, and the most popular topics searched for.

"Our readers love to see what other New York Times readers are looking at" by checking the most e-mailed list, says Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com, the Times's website.

On July 11, the Times launched a limited beta test of MyTimes, which will let website visitors create their own home page. If they wish, their page can include material from other favorite online sources using RSS (Really Simple Syndication). A reader could put "arts" or "sports" stories at the top, for example, and send international news to the bottom – or drop it entirely.

MyTimes readers will also be able to create a home page based on what stories were most popular with other Times readers, Ms. Schiller says. That appears to send the paper veering toward Digg's model.

But Schiller sees more differences than similarities. The Times's familiar home page won't be edited by readers, she says. "That's sort of hard to imagine. That's not what people come to us for," she says. "They come because they want to know what The New York Times thinks are the most important stories."

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