Having built a huge and loyal following on the shared news book-marking site Digg.com, from a tiny start up in 2004 into the community news behemoth that it has become today, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, the co-founders, and podcasting guru's are moving to build on the social networking phenomenon that has perpetuated MySpace, Bebo and Facebook to the forefront of the resurgent web 2.0 companies.

Digg plan to expand value to their user-submitted news junkies base and 'digg' into social networking areas. By mining third-party content, users collectively bring like-minded people together, readers who congregate over common themes, or subjects, much like on an archeological dig, if you will, only this time it is in cyberspace. The hope is that 'diggers' will begin to develop friendships and build their own social networks on-line.

The Digg community would be useful to publishers and writers as way to access who is interested in reading what stories and which stories are striking up discussions and causing a buzz. Advertisers would naturally be interested as the data gathered by Digg would enable them to target market specific demographics.

Seems to me that this viable progression puts Digg in the shop window and they could very will be the next independently owned web 2.0 company to be snapped up by one of the big media networks looking to get in on the social networking bandwagon.

Tell me, can you Digg it?