News aggregator Topix has moved away from its Google News-like roots and adopted a slightly more Digg-like model. The company has traditionally taken a top-down approach to news, providing users with links to newspaper articles from around the country. Starting today, Topix will instead implement a bottom-up approach, by
asking users to submit relevant news stories in local, national, international, sports, and entertainment sections.
Users who sign up for the service will be able to submit local news clips or original stories through the web site or from a cellphone. When there's nobody around to submit or edit news, a "roboblogger" posts links to newspaper articles.
Right now, most of the content on the site seems to be links to mainstream news articles, with very few articles written by users. But the goal isn't necessarily to turn Topix into a repository of user generated news overnight. Rather the goal appears to be to get users to have more meaningful interactions with the site.
While Topix gets about 10 million unique visitors a month, most just look at a few articles through the site and then move on, not the best way to generate advertising revenues. Adding social features to the site will give users a reason to spend more time on Topix.