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Arianna Huffington, personality and political blogger, continues to embrace all things new and Web 2.0 by introducing Digg-like functionality to her self-named web property, The Huffington Post, or Huffpo for short. Dubbed, unsurprisingly, HuffIt, the beta service apes Kevin Rose's voting and news aggregating service Digg. Although not a direct threat, the introduction does shed light on the challenges facing Digg.

Digg has had difficulty expanding its core market beyond tech and pop culture content while the Huffpo is popular amongst the politicos. Although there is overlapping content, the audiences are largely distinct. And Huffit is unlikely to draw a new audience; it may not even see broad adoption within its base. It mostly serves to improve the ranking of news within the existing Huffpo community. (And provide Huffington a new opportunity to brand her own name. Who else has their own verb? Trump doesn't count.)

When Kevin Rose debuted Digg, it was novel and drew upon a rabid base of geeks, but now the functionality is easy to replicate. Expanding the content and audience beyond the base is the fundamental challenge. Where does Rose find that audience if other communities can mirror Digg's features? The Digg community will not abandon the popular news aggregator, but Huffpo readers are unlikely to become diggers, they're likely to prefer "huffing" instead.