But they just make ridiculous statements on the website that I can't ignore. The home page says Newspond is "The most advanced news site on the planet." The about page has a huge yellow ball thingy and the same words in 40 point type. It also calls itself "the ultimate hub for the latest news."

What's the technology behind this stunning new startup? Well, within "the heart of Newspond lies a tireless electronic brain" with "highly-advanced machine intelligence" that analyzes news "at a faster rate of speed than any human being could ever dream of."

A reliable source just confirmed the company's plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal. The asking price is still $300 million, the source said.

This will come as no surprise. Rumors of a sale have been rampant for months, although until now we hear co-founder Jay Adelson has been trying to muster up interest in a sale. This is the first time Digg has hired a bank to shop the deal, we're told.

Valleywag reported the $300 million rumor last month. Separately, it reported Digg chief executive Jay Adelson's attendance at Allen & Company's annual Sun Valley, Idaho get-together of the rich and famous, noting the company might be looking to find a buyer among one of the many media company executives in attendance.

New startup Mixx, which went in to private beta just two months ago, may be finding itself with the right product at the right time. Digg users, including top contributors, are showing an increasing amount of frustration with the Digg community, and many are leaving. Conspiracy theories that Digg auto buries stories with certain topics or linking to certain sites only compounds the problem.

Some users eventually go to Reddit, Propeller or any of a number of other Digg-like sites. But a disproportionate amount of them seem to be heading to Mixx, and writing about their choice.

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.

Gloomy news indeed--if any of it were substantiated. As the head of the non-freaked-out editorial department, let me say a few things. AOL did just launch a Netscape-branded portal, designed to accommodate those members who don't wish to participate in a social news site. (Those members also have the option of using a personalized portal over at My.Netscape, not to mention the regular AOL portal itself.) No doubt some members will jump ship. But since the social news version of Netscape launched more than a year ago, most of the people with a yen for an old-fashioned portal have already left. Certainly the 323,589 individuals (as of this moment) who have joined the community didn't do so simply to check the weather and headlines.

Our director, Tom Drapeau, already responded to Arrington's post on TechCrunch itself. So did Marcien Jenckes, identified by TC as an "AOL spokesman" but actually a senior vice president in charge of some of the company's premiere properties, including AIM and Userplane.

"I want to echo Tom's post," noted Jenckes. "Community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception and will continue to be. As the text on the site explains, we wanted to give a more traditional portal alternative to the Netscape users who requested it. You can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do."

No one's more surprised at this robust Web presence than Paul himself, a self-described "old-school," "pen-and-paper guy" who's serving his 10th congressional term and was the Libertarian Party's nominee for president in 1988.

"To tell you the truth, I hadn't heard about this YouTube and all the other Internet sites until supporters started gathering in them," confessed Paul, 71, who said that he's raised about $100,000 after each of the three debates. Not bad considering that his campaign had less than $10,000 when his exploratory committee was formed in mid-February. "I tell you I've never raised money as efficiently as that, in all my years in Congress, and all I'm doing is speaking my mind."

That means saying again and again that the Republican Party, especially when it comes to government spending and foreign policy, is in "shambles."

But while many Democrats have welcomed the young and fresh-faced Obama, who's trailing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in most public opinion polls, Paul is barely making a dent in the Republican polls.

Republican strategists point out that libertarians, who make up a small but vocal portion of the Republican base, intrinsically gravitate toward the Web's anything-goes, leave-me-alone nature. They also say that his Web presence proves that the Internet can be a great equalizer in the race, giving a much-needed boost to a fringe candidate with little money and only a shadow of the campaign staffs marshaled by Romney, McCain and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

It's now been more than two years since the first story was submitted and dugg on Digg. Since then you guys have helped Digg move from a personal project amongst a group of friends to a huge online community. Now, your contributions in submitting, digging, and commenting on content have propelled Digg to a point I never dreamed of - as of today Digg has one million registered users.

I'd like to let this post serve as a thank you from me to you - the Digg community faithful. You've not only made it possible for the Digg team to continue the Digg concept in new and exciting ways, but you've also driven us, with a sense of pride and excitement that genuinely makes going to work a lot of fun.

Four and a half hours later, I was the only person who had dugg my story. That's when I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help "submitters" get Digg stories noticed by paying "users" to digg them. There's a $20 sign-up fee and each digg costs $1, which gets split evenly between the service and the digger. U/S refunds money paid for any diggs the submitter doesn't get in a 48-hour period. I put down $450 for 430 diggs, but wound up getting refunded all but roughly $100 of that. (Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit.)

If the corporate brass at Digg were right, this would be a complete waste of my money. CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg "have failed," and that Digg "can tell when there are paid users." Adelson added, "When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don't remove their account so they don't realize they've been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn't work."

Ten hours after hiring U/S, I had 40 diggs. The vast majority of them had also dugg the Photoshop tutorial or the $35 offer. This was the moment when I reached a tipping point, and I began to get a lot of organic diggs and comments. The crowd on Digg is drawn to what's popular, and many of them second-guessed themselves when they checked out my blog and saw how crappy it was. Quomen commented, "None of those photographs really appeal to me. Am I defective? or just a loner."

Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There's a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more "reputable" in the Digg system. If you're trying to move up the Digg ranks, it's in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it's gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern.

When I woke up in the morning, my story had been awarded the "became popular" tag and had 121 diggs. U/S had done what it promised: The company had helped me buy my way into Digg popularity, and my site traffic had gone way up -- overnight, I'd been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror.

Ultimately, however, my story did get buried. If you search for it on Digg, you won't find it unless you check the box that says "also search for buried stories." This didn't happen because the Digg operators have brilliant algorithms, however -- it happened because many people in the Digg community recognized that my blog was stupid. Despite the fact that it was rapidly becoming popular, many commenters questioned my story's legitimacy. Digg's system works only so long as the crowds on Digg can be trusted.

The reason? Based on a conversation I had with Digg founder Kevin Rose recently, Digg thinks they are winning the war over the problem of "grouping" behavior (where groups of Digg accounts are controlled or effectively controlled by a person or group and can push stories to the home page). The changes they've made to Digg over the last few months, Rose says, allow them to monitor grouping behavior and stop it before it can drive a story to the home page. Thus, there is no real need to ban any particular site from Digg. They are confident that if a story from a previously banned site makes it to the home page, it deserves to be there.

Since the dawn of the Internet, one site has reigned over all others as the Web's official rounder-upper of the day's news: the Drudge Report. As anyone who works at a news website can tell you, the best driver of viewers to one of your stories is a link on Drudge. The second-best way is — there is no second-best way. For years, if a news story broke in the woods and Drudge didn't link to it, it didn't break.

Many, including such otherwise favored Web tycoons as Arianna Huffington and Gawker media's Nick Denton, have launched sites positioned as rivals to Drudge, but none has made a dent - until now. Welcome to Digg.com, the czar of social news - a kind of cross-pollination of Drudge and MySpace. The site's main function is fairly straightforward: Users post links on the Digg site to news stories. Other users look at the story and vote to either raise it up to the top of the site or bury it at the bottom.

So what does this all mean? After considerable internal debate and discussion with many of those who make up the Top Digger list, we've decided to remove the list beginning tomorrow. As for what's next, we're currently working on designing and refining the technologies required that will help enable our nearly 900,000 registered users to make real connections that we believe will greatly enhance the Digg experience – whether you're brand new to the site or have been on Digg since the beginning. We plan on rolling this out in the coming months along with features and programs that do a better job of rewarding positive contributions to the Digg community.

It's an exercise in futility. A competent programmer could easily throw together a page scraper to determine the top submitters, so when the dust settles, Digg will still have problems with pay-for-play, but the most prolific users will no longer be recognized by Digg for their work that makes the site so successful.

We show a little fire icon next to Top Searches, in case you want to write a blurb about something that's super hot.

Here's how we talk about; hope you love it!

Where's the Fire? What's Hot and Why.

Ever wonder why something is sooooo popular? Or want the whole story without having to dig through a zillion blog posts looking for the hot video or juicy pictures? WTF tells what's hot - and why - and where the good stuff is. Vote for your favorite WTFs to help the community bubble up the best ones. Jump in!

HuffIt lets you decide which news stories should get the most attention. You can submit and select news from anywhere in the world and the most popular stories will appear on the front of the Huffington Post.

Now, the hard truth: digg is never going to go beyond this group on the digg.com domain name. Now, this isn't a digg to digg, this is just a fact of life and some friendly advice to Jay and Kevin. When you build a huge, passionate community like digg has (and Fark, Slashdot, Engadget, iVillage, and the Well have), you live and die with that group. If digg wants to go big they should start a second digg for women, and one for politics--they shouldn't do it as part of digg.

Videos Enhancements
Aside from giving Videos their own position in the top navigation, we have added a couple cool features: Top 10 hottest videos, and on-Digg video previews. Simply click any video with a play icon to get lightbox window in which you can preview and Digg the video.

Podcasting
Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes. And don't forget - every time you Digg a podcast or podcast episode that is bookmarked in your profile and shared with your friends.

While addition of video digging is understandable - watching online video is one of the fastest growing activities on the Internet - it is hard to fathom Digg's efforts when it comes to podcasting. Despite lot of hype, podcasting hasn't gone mainstream. Listening to a podcasts takes a lot more time than reading a story, or watching a 120-second video.

"Digg is about sharing, and if people want to share podcasts, we want to give the ability to do that," says Adelson, and adds that it was one of the most requested features by Digg users. We don't give it much of a chance, but then we might be wrong. However, the podcast digging could eventually result in Digg expanding to say - music or photos. Now that could be fun!

Some marketers offer "content generation services," where they sell stories to Web sites for the sole purpose of getting them submitted to Digg and other sites. This combination of spam and blogs is called "splogs." The stories often feature topics and keywords in headlines that are likely to appeal to the Digg crowd, such as "geeks" and "Apple."

Lazier but still tricky marketers merely scrape content off legitimate sites to put up on their own sites in a technique called "link jacking." In essence, they are hijacking the links that should go back to the original site, experts say.

In a posting last week titled "The Spam Farms of the Social Web," blogger Niall Kennedy detailed how a suspicious item recently made it among the top five stories on Digg before the community "buried" it. The Digg user submission links to a story entitled "Geek's Guide to Getting in Shape: 13 Surefire Tips" written by "Dental Geek" for the i-Dental Resources blog. The blog site has links to other pages with ads that offer content creation marketing services and which collect money for dental plans sold, Kennedy said.

Digg isn't alone in these problems. News aggregator Reddit and Delicious, where users swap Internet bookmarks, are also susceptible, Kennedy said.

The following story made it to the front-page of Digg.com within 2 and a half hours of being submitted, and as I am writing this piece (3 and a half hours after being on the front-page), the story is still on the front-page of Digg:

"We just can't compete with The XBOX, it's cheaper and techologically more advanced than the Playstation, I think this might be the Playstations final year."

That should be more than enough to tip people off that this is a fake. What is problematic is that people continue to Digg the article even after Diggers pointed out more problems in the article

This isn't the first time this has happened and it's not limited to socially driven news sites like digg. The blogosphere widely reported last week that Yahoo had acquired mybloglog after Techcrunch broke the story. An formal announcement has yet to be made.

All of this points to a real problem in the social media world. The only yardsticks we use to measure the trustworthiness of a source are purely based on popularity - e.g. in-bound links, votes, etc. Now often popularity and quality are closely aligned. However, both of these incidents demonstrate that the current system isn't working. We need more.

But the California-based company is becoming concerned about trademark violation. A spokesman confirmed that it had sent the letters. "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues."

But although an attempt to protect the company's trademark, the letters have raised snickers after they were leaked on to the web. Bloggers have been making fun of the examples Google's lawyers deem acceptable. They included: "Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie."

Hugg is a new project by TreeHugger - a source for user-generated green news. What does this mean? It's simple - how many times have you found an article, a video or a website that you've wanted to share with all your green friends? Well, Hugg lets you to share this stuff with everyone. Plus, it lets other users rate shared stories by Hugging them. All posts start out in the queue. Each time a story is Hugged, it climbs the ranks. If a story gets enough Huggs, it jumps up to the front page where it can be seen by everyone who visits. Step by step instructions on how to add your news is found on the Submit page. Hugg is a place to post and harvest the latest on green architecture, transportation, fashion, alternative energy, politics, products and technology. It's green media, by you, for you!

But instead of embracing the new format, some of the site’s longtime fans used those interactive features to vehemently protest the change. One dismayed user posted an item titled "Netscape’s blunder!!!" on Netscape.com a few hours after the redesigned site was online. It elicited more than 300 comments, including pleas to "please bring the old Netscape.com back."

A petition soon followed. On July 1, Bert Lao, a U.C.L.A. graduate student who said he began visiting the Netscape.com portal site years ago as a teenager, posted an item on the new Web site about his petition requesting that the company "bring back our Netscape.com." Mr. Lao, who used the Internet alias Ernie Jenkins, said the petition received more than 1,000 electronic signatures before Netscape removed his entry from the "top stories" page and closed all comments.

"That signified to me that Netscape had no interest in hearing the opinions of those who wanted the old Netscape.com back," he said. The petition now has more than 1,300 signatures.

There is one piece of misinformation in the story: that we tried to silence the folks doing the petition by not letting them vote up negative Netscape stories on the new Netscape--that's simply not true. We've had a dozen negative stories about Netscape on the home page--just like DIGG has--and we understand that part of running a social news site is that your user base will use the site itself to talk to you. In fact, any negative story on AOL, Netscape, or myself immediatly goes to the number one position.

Hitwise says the Netscape site has seen a 17% increase from the week ending June 24 to the week ending July 15th. Given, that might largely come from the site’s recent media attention, but, hey, at least they're getting attention, which is more than the Netscape brand had before.

What Marc did is no different to what a lot of bloggers do to gain attention and page views. Digg is in fact an easy target, because if a blogger writes a post about Digg that takes one of either extreme (i.e. praises it, or attacks it in some way) - it's got a very good chance of making the Digg homepage. Slashdot on the other hand is much harder to game, because its editors (i.e. gatekeepers) are very strict on what stories make it onto Slashdot. Blogging about how Slashdot readers suck won't make it onto Slashdot, but blogging about how Digg readers suck almost certainly will make it onto Digg.

A similar formula applies to the blogosphere, no matter what part you come from - tech, politics, etc. You just need to identify the hot topics and then game away. In the tech blogosphere for example, Google is a hot topic and almost guaranteed to bring in the hits. Especially if you are controversial and/or pick an argument with other bloggers. That's why the snarky or cynical bloggers are so popular - because it's easy to gain attention by dissing something. It's also why there are so many extreme, black/white opinions amongst bloggers. It's like politics in a way: pick the right or the left and try to shout down the opposition.

Putting this kind of audience in front of a Digg like service could spell trouble for many sites that ultimately make it to the top of the site. A Digg or Slashdot story can send tens of thousands of visitors to a site in a matter of minutes or hours. With Netscape, this effect could be many times larger - possibly resulting in outages at sites headlining the new service.

Digg already soared past Slashdot as the most influential tech-centered news portal. The "Digg effect" can bring down the servers of sites linked from the homepage and drive a frenzy of blogging and news coverage -- or spread rumors like nobody's business. That's why Yahoo reportedly offered $40 million for the company (to which founder Kevin Rose says, "I wish!")

But Digg is destined for bigger things than tech news. The above screenshot of Digg version 3 (not showing? wait for it), leaked from a beta tester a week before its launch, reveals categories for "Business" and "World News." This should give Digg a leg up on AOL's rumored general-interest Digg killer.

I had the scoop but couldn't blab until now. But Jossip let the catty out of the bag, revealing the quiet launch of Lipstick.com as a Digg for the glamorous celebrity set instead of unglamorous geeks from Conde Nast.

The original Netscape division has been more than decimated over the last few years and layoffs have been almost routine these last few months. The new Netscape.com will be headed by Calacanis, who came in through AOL's acquisition of Weblogs Inc. Not clear what role Weblogs, Inc.'s blogs would play but both divisions would report in Calacanis, according to the sources. He already reports to Jim Bankoff, executive VP of Programming & Products, who would also oversee the Netscape.com changes.

Calacanis has been a big Digg fan and has written about it on his blog a few times. He has yet to respond to our query about these details, but said on his own blog in response to rumours: "There are no details to share right now, but if that changes I'll certainly let you know."

For sure the b'sphere will continue to remain the largest galaxy in the social media universe in the short term. It's a major center of gravity that pulls people toward it. However, over the last few months a number other social media galaxies have rapidly risen to prominence. Take YouTube, digg and MySpace. These are just three examples, but they are drawing huge audiences. Richard Edelman is gushing over a fourth - StupidVideos.com.

As these constellations grow, some will become larger and more influential than the blogosphere. We're already seeing early signs of this and the power brokers will shift. For example, mobile jones notes that Technorati's coverage of MySpace is sorely lacking. Technorati also does little to help us mine and track YouTube, digg, StupidVideos.com and countless other smaller galaxies of consumer generated media. They focus on blogs.

Just talked to Joshua Schachter, who emailed to say that he sold del.icio.us, the innovative tagging service, to Yahoo.

First things first. He wouldn't say how much Yahoo paid for the service, which now has 300,000 subscribers. But he said he did the deal because he felt it would help the service, which he launched at the end of 2003, grow more quickly than it could have on its own. "We're going to continue to build our vision but with more resources, technology and distribution," he says.

Del.icio.us will continue operating as a stand along service at the same time as Yahoo will integrate more of the tagging technology across its network of offerings.