Every morning, before I start my day, I’ve gotten into the habit of browsing through Digg posts. For those of you who don’t know what Digg is, it’s basically a site that gathers together the most popular news reports, videos, webcomics, blog posts, etc. of the day. In more and more sites today, you are about to click a “Digg this” button to vote for the post, which basically bumps it up on the Digg listings. Since the site tracks the most popular Dugg posts of the day, the submissions usually (but not always) reflect updated news and events.

What I’ve started to notice is that news sites like CNN are about a day behind when compared to Digg. That means that some of the news that gets submitted into Digg show up on CNN.com a day later (and sometimes more). It seems that, with the exception of breaking news, Digg.com is a faster way to get news than CNN (and many other leading news networks).

This doesn’t really mean that news networks are slower than Digg. All Digg news posts usually have to start out as news reports first, and if they’re interested, people vote on them and they pop up on the site. But Digg serves more as a filtering device that lets you prioritize (to the extent you want a mass of strangers prioritizing your news for you) what news the “Internet as a whole” finds interesting.

Not surprisingly, most of the news that get bumped up on the lists are interesting, bizarre, or funny in some way. Mundane stuff usually don’t get bumped up, and there seems to be an uneven amount of posts devoted to animals (usually cats). Much of the submissions are also devoted to lists (e.g. “most underrated games of all time”) and similar pursuits.

The site also allows users to comment on the posts. These are usually somewhat funny and give you an idea of who the Digg users are (I’m guessing, mostly males, 18-30, left-leaning, techies).

Digg was founded by Kevin Rose in 2004, and it’s turned into quite the Web 2.0 phenomenon since then.