When Britain’s Daily Telegraph published a story in June on America's Dixie Chicks, it’s unlikely that anyone expected what happened next. The story quickly became one of the most read on the paper’s web site, ultimately accounting for one in 10 visits that week.

The reason: The story was also linked on Digg, what's known as a collaborative editing site, where links to stories are posted and ranked by readers.

Soon the Daily Telegraph will put links at the bottom of stories that make it easier for readers to post stories on Digg and similar sites. It will become one of a growing number of news sites to do so.

"We think that it is something that we should be embracing. It is the way that a lot of people get their news now," says Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk news editor. "If we can make it easier for readers to put stories up [on sites like Digg], all the better."

In some ways, Digg is a revolutionary notion. There are no editors as such. It's left to users--call them readers, if you will--to determine what's the news that day and, in effect, how to tell it. The users select which stories are to appear, and from where, whether it be the Telegraph or the New York Post, by submitting the story links. They also determine the order in which they appear.

That's why Digg and others like it are called collaborative editing sites, which separates them from sites that simply link stories published elsewhere. Collaborative sites, sometimes referred to as social news sites, have been growing over the past year, and suddenly there seems to be a rash of stories about them.

There were the reports that AOL’s new Netscape beta version incorporates many of the features of these social news sites, although it will continue to have editors. Then there was the news that Digg would be expanding out of its technology niche by starting up sections on entertainment, world and business, gaming, science and videos.

Digg, founded a year and a half ago, has seen its weekly U.S. visits grow four-fold this year, according to internet tracker Hitwise. Digg is the biggest of the social news sites it tracks.

Digg now claims to have more than 8 million unique visitors each month and more than 300,000 active registered users, and those figures are expected to leap up with the upcoming redesign. Weekly U.S visits to Del.icio.us, another social news site, are up seven fold this year. Visits to Reddit and Newsvine are also up, says Hitwise.

All this makes such sites even more desirable allies for traditional new sites.

"The thing I find really interesting is that this trend puts the publisher in a better position in a lot of ways than they have been in for a while online because these sites can be a fantastic form of boosting traffic," says Heather Hopkins, director of research at Hitwise in London. "I think that we will see more and more publishers make links easy."

Other publishers to add such links are Marketwatch, Ziff Davis and CNET.

Ultimately, believes Richmond, in years to come the traffic that these sites generate for the Daily Telegraph could even help with advertising. "Primarily we sell advertising based on who our readers are. So these random viewers may not help, but boosting overall traffic may be of some advantage," he says.

Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended June 25, the top five parent companies remained the same. Microsoft was No. 1, followed by Yahoo, Time Warner, Google and News Corp., according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Top brands were Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Google, Microsoft and AOL.

GUS Plc once again retained the top spot among advertisers, delivering 5.63 million impressions to No. 2 Vonage’s 4.31 million, both up over last week. Yahoo served up the most ads, 19.58 million, followed by MySpace at 8.08 million.

Sessions per person was steady at 16, and domains visited per person were at 38, one more than last week. Average PC time per person dipped slightly to 15 hours, 59 minutes and 42 seconds for the week.