To Digg or Not to Digg

I've been "digging" a lot lately. Its great watching the newest dugged links. From viral videos, reports of police brutality, biased political blogs and another blog piece defending PC or praising Mac.

Ok I'm being sarcastic. Not that great, but I can't seem to stop myself from checking Digg.com every time I open my web browser. Heck Digg.com is one of my home tabs and so are a couple other link ranking sites. However, the ranking systems on all of these link-ranking sites are really bothering me.

I keep asking myself every time I go onto Digg, "Why aren’t there undigg buttons for the links?" There's an undigg button for comments, but not one for links. There are so many rankings on the web that no one knows whose number 1! Doc Searls of Linux Journal and The Cluetrain Manifesto made a good point about how its "odd not to see BoingBoing, long #1 on Technorati’s list, not present at all on Techmeme’s. Same with the new #1, Huffington Post. Not technical enough, perhaps? One can only guess."

What's really getting to me in addition to the ranking is how link-ranking sites are now getting bought. Reddit.com last year was bought out by the owner of Wired.com, Conde Nast. Just today, Newsvine to my surprise was acquired by MSNBC.com.

My independent news source has just been acquired by a major news corporation. While I'm glad that Mike D and the rest of his staff will get the help to expand the site, how independent will it remain? How will ranking of news be affected in the future? Will the restraints come up against biased articles?