I was late to jump on the Digg bandwagon. People raved about it being a great source of news, reflecting the collective consciousness of the Internet community, but I was only convinced a few months ago.

Bored of traditional news sites, I set Digg's top stories from the last 24hrs as my browser home page, so every morning a load of new stories were waiting for me to read while I sip my tea.

But I'm not so keen now. The Digg model has its problems. The first is technical. A story, picture or video is posted onto a small site, often a local newspaper, who won't have 100s of servers to dish out content. The story is posted to Digg, and proves hugely popular. It makes it to the front page, getting more traffic. But the server it is posted on can't keep up, and the story has to be taken down.

By the time I get to read it, it might be the top story on Digg, but all I get to see is a 404 page. If a video, the writer should have posted it to Youtube and embedded the clip in the page rater than host it themselves, of course. But this is seriously annoying. You can read the headline, the description and the comments, but can't find out what all the fuss is about.

Then of course there is the subject matter. The "collective Internet consciousness" is actually a subset of all Internet users: mostly young, male, American, with a liberal bias. And of course this is a webpage on the Internet, which is a big network of computer things. So technical stories are big. No surprise really.

It gets annoying after a while though. The iPhone hype was ridiculous. "Steve Jobs has caught a cold", "iPhone bills are huge", etc, nothing really newsworthy. And the US election hype is driving me mad. Hilary says X, Guilianni says Y. But who is Ron Paul? In the UK he gets zero airtime, nobody has heard of him. According to Digg stories though, he is gonna be the next US president. Right.

Digg could do well to introduce localised pages, where say, French users could post on French stories, for example, and avoid the gross Americanisation of the site. Perhaps criticising Digg for not being of the same quality as traditional news sources is missing the point; it's an alternative source of news, a collection of cool links, chosen by its users.

But if Digg is a model for citizen journalism, where the vote of the user replaces the traditional editor, the tabloids don't need to worry. Yet.