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Digg co-founder, media darling, and geek heartthrob Kevin Rose co-hosts Diggnation.

(Credit: Diggnation)

Revision3, the edgy MTV-style "TV network for the Web" owned by the founders of Digg, will soon have its shows syndicated on Blip.tv.

That means Kevin Rose, Digg co-founder and co-host of Diggnation, will be appearing on even more Internet channels for those teens and twentysomethings who just can't get enough of his shayna punim. Revision3 shows are available on iTunes and, now with the Blip.tv deal, they may even end up on traditional TV sets.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Update at 3:35 p.m. PST: Digg CEO Jay Adelson has posted a blog that seems to be saying talk of a Digg sale is much ado about nothing. My colleague Caroline McCarthy has written about what Adelson had to say on News.com's The Social.

Are we nearing the end of Digg independence?

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch is reporting Friday that Google, Microsoft, and two media companies may be preparing to make an offer on Digg. Just how much Digg could fetch isn't quite clear: Arrington reports it's likely to be in the range of $200 million to $225 million. If those figures are accurate, that's well below the $300 million price a bank working for Digg was floating a year ago. Interestingly, it's the exact value BusinessWeek put on Digg in a controversial August 2006 cover story.

But here's a question lots of these prospective buyers must be asking themselves: if they buy Digg, will users rebel?

Digg founder Kevin Rose

(Credit: Digg)

The Digg community has never seemed terribly fond of corporate types. Let's not forget the Great Digg Rebellion of May 2007. A story was posted to Digg that contained a decryption key that allowed Linux users to decode and play HD DVDs. Digg execs received a request to pull the story down and did so, believing they were following the law and the site's own terms of use that ban posting infringing content.

Then all hell broke loose. Digg users posted hundreds of stories with links to the decryption key. Not surprisingly, those stories were dugg up until the site was blanketed with the content they had tried to pull down. Digg reversed course after users made it clear who really runs the company.

Rose wrote in a blog"...after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."

Just last week, my colleague Caroline McCarthy asked Rose at a conference in Miami how the Digg community would react if his company got acquired. He had some very interesting comments:

For us, we have a fully funded business model, and we have a great ad relationship with Microsoft, and it feels really good to be able to react quickly and not have to worry about some of the problems that come with working with a larger company.

I've had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world, and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down. You can't get a product out the door fast enough.

OK, whether Rose is thrilled about working for The Man isn't as important as what users think. Early returns on the Digg boards aren't promising. Just a sampling of the first page of comments on the thoroughly dugg TechCrunch post includes:

•  "Don't sell Digg Kevin! Digg this story he needs to know how we feel!"

•  "DO NOT WANT!!!!!"

•  "NNOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!"

•  "Crap !!!"

The sentiment among Diggers who accept that selling little companies to big companies is the way capitalism often works is, above all: Don't sell to Microsoft. "If google gets digg. I'm ok with that. If Microsoft gets digg, I'm not and won't be coming back to dig," wrote another user.

No doubt, if a sale does go through, it will be the community that decides if it's money well spent. A Digger, not surprisingly, perfectly summarizes the dilemma for any corporate suitor. Here's a slightly condensed version:

1. msft has spent enough time on this site to realize they are hated, why would they buy a community that hates them?

2. google has lost a few billion the last few months. while a digg purchase is still a drop in the bucket for them, i assume social website acquisitions can't be a high priority for them and will be frowned upon by the market

3. after hd-dvd, i wouldn't want digg if i had to buy it. why drop a couple hundred mil for a group that will turn on and shut the site down (on) you in a second?

Good points. I suspect a few M&A types are asking themselves those questions right now.

Social news site Digg launched on Wednesday night a new algorithm to try to prevent groups from gaming the system.

The update effectively punishes people who vote in groups to promote certain stories. The result of the update is that stories that reach the homepage will need to be "dugg" by a diverse group of people.

"Digg's promotional algorithm ensures that the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page," Digg founder Kevin Rose said in a blog. "Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page."

He goes on to say that as a result of the new algorithm, it will not be uncommon to see stories with more than 100 diggs still in the "upcoming" section. As I am writing this, there are three stories in the upcoming section with more than 150 diggs, the most popular standing at 155.

(Credit: Digg)

This is supposedly evidence of the new algorithm at work, but I can't help but think that it must be disheartening for the submitters. The other side of the coin is that Digg's top submitters do wield a good deal of power and often receive a lot of diggs just because of who they are; that's not to say they didn't deserve to get to that point in the first place. The top submitters are in this position because they consistently submit great content.

This update will certainly give the little guys a better chance at getting a story on the front page, but it may anger some of the longtime users.

If the top stories are going to be read by a very diverse group of people, then it is important that they are determined by a diverse group of people. The truth is, however, that a lot of the content on Digg has been determined by groups of hardcore users, and this update may render some of their actions ineffective.

On the whole, I think it's important to stop gaming on Digg, and this is a really good way to do that. I'm sure that a good deal of thought was put into these changes and that Digg would not want to mess with a winning formula without careful consideration.

However, as we have seen in the past and as we are starting to see now, Digg fans are very vocal when they don't like something. Digg could have another great uprising on its hands if the new algorithm does not show any apparent benefits to the community.

After telling you all that Digg was the best social destination of 2007, the column made it onto the front page of the site. And while some comments echoed my sentiment--namely, that other social sites are, well, crap--the vast majority of commenters found a number of faults in Digg.

Although the general opinion of Digg faithful can't be judged based on comments on one story, can it be said that there is a Digg revolt in the works that is led by a group of individuals who are fed up with Ron Paul stories, crazy videos, and a broken comment system?

If the comments on that story are to be believed, a revolt could happen.

I'm with Nick Carr on this one: Techmeme doesn't drive much traffic. Nor does Valleywag, in my experience. These sites are said to be important within Silicon Valley circles, but I've had stories hit both, and the most I've seen from them is a few hundred pageviews.

Digg drives tens of thousands. Slashdot is the same. Groklaw, too, is up there. The Silicon Valley aggregators? Not so much.

It may be, as Nick allows, that these sites are important for the influencers that read them. But they're certainly not important for volume. Nick writes:

Well that was quick. Just a few days after Netscape's announcement that it was shelving its social news service away from the hallowed Netscape.com domain in place of what is essentially AOL's front page, the service has already been given a new name and URL. It's called Propeller.com (link dead ends right now), and that's about all Netscape's Director Tom Drapeau was willing to divulge about the rebranded site in his announcement post on the official Netscape blog.

The new logo is arguably well done, but what's missing here are some details about any tweaks or changes to the rudimentary functionality of the site, and what really separates it from Digg besides a layer of editorial funneling. If it's just a new logo and domain, Netscape has an uphill battle ahead in attracting new users, even with the free traffic that's bound to come from whatever promotion or integration it gets with the new portal site--which in my guess is going to be far fewer free eyeballs than Netscape got before.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Jason Calacanis' personal project, Netscape's Digg clone, has officially closed up shop. When it was initially introduced, Netscape drew a lot of criticism for the site's similarities to Digg and for trying to bribe its top users to switch over to Netscape.

There have been rumors of Netscape closing down the site for a few weeks, but now it's official. On Netscape's blog, Tom Drapeau noted the reason for the shut down as being that, "...we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn't expect to find it on Netscape.com." Going forward, Netscape will be focusing on a more traditional portal site, which can be found here, but will apparently also be releasing a new social news portion of its site.

So, goodbye, Netscape social news. It was a valiant attempt, but you just can't buy strong communities.

Social news aggregator Digg prides itself on how much control its users have over the site's content, something that was reiterated earlier this month when Digg ultimately refused to comply with a takedown notice pertaining to a story that contained a crack for HD DVD's digital rights management. Users of Digg can also opt to "bury" stories, giving the thumbs-down to submissions that they don't think deserve to be displayed on the site.

But according to a post Monday on the Pronet Advertising blog, blogger Neil Patel accused Digg of pulling an earlier post from the same blog and masking it as a user-generated "bury." His rationale is that the post in question didn't appear in a list of "bury" commands from that day--data that Digg makes public.

Additionally, Patel quotes a Twitter post from blogger Stefan Juhl in order to back up his speculation that Digg may be pulling the strings. In the post, Juhl says that he "got buried by Digg... not the community, but digg... last referrer before buried was crawl3.digg.internal."

Digg was not immediately available for comment.

Digg creator Kevin Rose is reportedly at work on a new start-up, according to blog reports.

The new company, which Rose is developing with Leah Culver and Digg colleague Daniel Burka, is developing a communication tool that could be an "IM competitor," Om Malik reported.

Bloggers were buzzing over the news, and wondering what direction the news business, which may launch later this month, would take.

Blog community response:

"Even though twitter is compared as a sort of IM tool, it's more like group promotion and IM all rolled into one. I'm hoping that this new tool is going to make things faster, and better. I just can't see a ton of room left in the IM marketplace at this time. Video, lifecasting, search, and twitter mash ups top my list of most interesting right now."
--Technically Speaking

"The initial and obvious thought would be a Digg-like, Twitter-like thing--but if people are already questioning the usefulness of Twitter, they will really question the usefulness of voting on the mundane things people are saying. Instead, I'm guessing it won't be anything related to Digg as Rose only took Burka with him from Digg to work on it."
--Paris Lemon

"I love that this article has been dugg by dburka. Sounds like validation to me!"
--Digg