Rather than having professional editors at news organizations determine the important stories of the day, people are taking on this role themselves at aggregation sites where users select and share what they deem the most important news or websites.

Users submit stories or websites to be listed on the aggregation sites, and other users then vote on or help rank the importance of the stories or sites and how prominently they should be displayed.

Examples of of aggregators include:

• Digg - a news stories aggregator, where a vote for a story is called a "digg."
• Reddit - a news stories aggregator that was purchased in 2006 by magazine publisher Conde Nast.
• Mixx - Their motto: "So why should some faceless editor get to decide what's important? But now you're in charge. You find it; we'll Mixx it."
• Delicious - on this site people submit bookmarks of their favorite websites to share them with others. The bookmarks are arranged topically and are ranked by the most popular submissions. You also can find the personal bookmarks of the person who posted them.
• StumbleUpon - another site for sharing favorite websites.
• Publish2 - this site is designed for news organizations that want their journalists to share links on news stories and have those links aggregated on the publication's website.

Aggregators also have widgets people can use to embed story feeds on their blogs, websites or personal pages on social networks.

And news websites can place icons for the aggregation services at the end of stories, so readers can click on the icons to submit the stories for inclusion in the listings by the aggregators.

See for example, the CNN website. Click on a story there, scroll to the end and click on the Share button.