Looking for ways to control the influx of Web information? If so, you're not alone. We're surrounded by so many sources of news that knowing where to look for what is a huge challenge.

But plenty of experimentation is going on to figure out how to control the flow, and one of the most intriguing of these is Digg (www.digg.com).

I went to the Digg site expecting to be underwhelmed. Like many projects that rely on user input, Digg seemed to be setting itself up for what is nowadays referred to as the "echo chamber" effect common to Web logs -- one site comments on a story, then another does, and pretty soon everyone is talking about the same thing. A group fixation on a single story or topic can cause writing that is more interesting to slip past unnoticed.

But Digg turns out to be surprisingly engaging. So much so that I'm working on this column much later than usual, having gotten caught up in watching Digg at work, and finding myself reading numerous items that I never saw on the pages of other tech news sources. I then joined the Digg community (it's free) and found that participating in the inflow is fascinating. A constant stream of incoming ideas is always viewed and manipulated by Digg users.

Here's how it works: The front page of Digg is a collection of stories that users have submitted, and what you're seeing are the winners, those items that have received the most votes by registered users. By signing up, you can go to a page where the submitted stories are constantly streaming in. When you find one you think worthwhile, you click the Digg button. Each user can only 'digg' or recommend a single story one time, and the changing vote totals determine how the stories are presented on the site.

So there I was, reading a story about a new test version of Firefox (2.0) and scrolling through features on everything from the New Horizons mission to Pluto to an Atlantic Monthly article on the origins of religion. Page after page of links to such items were available, and on just about every page I found one or two stories that piqued my interest, so I "dugg" them with a mouse-click. When a story gets enough clicks, it makes it onto the front page.

But that front page is a small part of the story. Digg also includes a search function that is tied to RSS (Really Simple Syndication). So if I'm trying to follow stories about robots, for example, I can search for that term, and then subscribe to the search page's RSS feed. That means I can have updates on my search sent to me as they arrive, a sort of de facto newswire created solely on my terms and based on items discovered by the Digg user base.

For a look behind the scenes, I went to Digg's "spy" page, where the stories that are being "dugg" scroll along in real time. You can watch items rising in importance as more and more votes support them, and others beginning to fade. I had thought that a lot of irrelevant material would show up because of pranksters, but it seems that the community of users is effective at squelching such materials, which get quickly voted out of the queue.

Digg is set up as a technology site, so many of the stories you find on it are specifically related to computers and high-tech gadgets. But I notice that eBay's Pierre Omidyar, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and a major venture capital firm have all put money into the company recently. That inflow suggests that Digg's methods could be adapted to news sites on other specialty topics, an outcome I suspect we'll be reading more about in the next few months.

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