As online news consumption grows, the methods by which we find and evaluate our news continue to evolve. "Social news" has become increasingly popular, especially with the advent of Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, and more that let users vote on and evaluate each other's shared items. Two more takes on social news have gone public this week, bringing along their own approaches on how to present the "best" news while allowing the users to interact with the stories.

The first is NewsCred, first launched privately in May and opened to the public today. NewsCred acts as a sort of news aggregator like Google News, except with a number of twists. For one, NewsCred allows you to choose among a handful of news and blog sources that you'd like to see news from. More importantly, however, is the fact that NewsCred uses an algorithm to rank stories on the page based on the credibility of the story, the publication, and then author.

How is credibility determined? Users get to rank that too, giving NewsCred an idea of how much each story and source can be trusted. "Our algorithms analyze this data, and unlike other social news sites, we use the data to present the news based on quality, not popularity," the company said in an e-mailed statement. This structure means that users don't get to vote up stories to the front page like they do on some other sites, but they still get to offer input that ultimately affects what gets shown on the main site.

The second is more along the lines of what we're already familiar with. Yahoo Buzz has now opened up to all sites as well, allowing anyone to submit content that they think is interesting into the buzz machine. Previously operating as a closed beta to select publishers (including Ars), Buzz allows users to "buzz up" stories they find interesting, similar to Digg. However, not just any stories will end up getting buzzed, but when they do, they get posted to the front page of Yahoo.com. That's some pretty major exposure, and the level of traffic driven by Yahoo once something gets buzzed is exponentially higher than most other social news sites, including Digg.

Now that Yahoo Buzz is open to the public, there will be more stories available to vote up, and hopefully a more diverse selection to choose from, too. Unlike NewsCred, Yahoo doesn't claim to promote stories based on credibility, although so far, the stories that are promoted to the front page of Yahoo tend to be from news sources that are considered well-known and trustworthy. Whether that will change once there's an influx of blog posts and other content submitted to Buzz remains to be seen, but both of these sites offer differing takes on social news that will likely keep the masses busy for some time.