San Francisco - Social news aggregation site Digg announced on its blog on Thursday that it will effect a round of layoffs, later telling All Things D that it will cut about 10% of its staff of 75.

Twitter has become a popular pastime for many who like to update their daily thoughts and activates, as well as for the voyeurs who just enjoy reading the tweets. Last week, the market share of visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time since launch and was ranked #84 (one above Digg at #85) in the Computers and Internet category. A big driver of traffic to Twitter last week was around the US Airways plane crash in to the Hudson River last Thursday, driving many posts and updates about the situation.

San Francisco - Online social network Facebook has introduced Facebook Connect, which allows outside websites and applications to share data back and forth. The company launched the new feature with 24 partners, including Digg, Movable Type creators Six Apart and Citysearch. The feature allows, for instance, Facebook users to sign in to Digg with their Facebook account authentication, and to have news stories they select via Digg, or comments they leave on Movable Type blogs to show up in their Facebook news feeds.

Mixx.com, the social news website supported by many big mainstream media brands, is in the news for releasing results that show its traffic has more than doubled in May. I was following the thread on this story this morning on Techmeme and thought I'd share some Hitwise data that may answer some of the questions being raised. Marshall Kilpatrick at Red Write Web suggests that while the growth is impressive he is surprised the site receives less than 5% of the traffic that goes to Digg. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch points out that the growth in May came as a result of links from the bottom of all CNN.com stories.

Digg Dubb: Groove Is In The Heart from Trammell on Vimeo.
A new viral lip dub video has appeared (embedded above). This time courtesy of the staff at Digg. I would say it's a worthy follow-up to the video done at the offices at College Humor and Connected Ventures (see below). Revision3 has also joined the party with a lip bud video of their own (embedded at the bottom, gotta love INXS). Think about it, these videos are not just viral branding for the companies but also smart recruitment tools...

This morning I was interested to see the thread on Techmeme's homepage about the success so far of Yahoo! Buzz. The RedWriteWeb story provides statistics on traffic from Yahoo! Buzz to some of the publishers involved in the Beta. ReadWriteWeb claims that Yahoo! Buzz "spells trouble for Digg". What do the figures show?

Los Angeles - Digg, the social news aggregation site where users vote on what they think are the most important news stories, is working with investment bank Allen & Co. to set up a possible sale, with Google and Microsoft among likely suitors, TechCrunch reported, citing a source very close to the deal.

Digg is a great experiment in web “democracy” — a site where ANYONE can submit links to content and vote on links to their favorite content. The positive outcome of the Digg experiment has been demonstrating the power of “networked human intelligence” to filter the vast sea of content on the web and allocate attention to content on a scale only rivaled by search. But Digg has also demonstrated that a completely open network will be subject to so much gaming and manipulating that it’s not possible to maintain that openness.

San Francisco - Internet TV network Revision3 on Thursday launched The Digg Reel, a weekly program that will showcase the highest-rated user-submitted videos on aggregation site Digg.com. Hosted by Jessica Corbin, the show will collect the videos as well as take viewers behind the scenes to meet their creators.

New York - CBS Interactive (NYSE: CBS) said on Wednesday that it has partnered with news aggregation site Digg to provide reciprocal links and content during the 2008 election. Digg's election headlines will receive placement on CBSNews.com, while buttons that add a story to Digg's service will be placed alongside CBSNews.com content.

The Project For Excellence in Journalism compared the news coverage of social news sites Digg, Reddit, and Delicious to that of mainstream media and found, not surprisingly, not a lot of overlap. What I found most notable is the report mistakenly assumes that the news on Digg and Reddit reflect the interests of their entire user base:

Mountain View, Calif. - Google has added the ability for certain users to add comments to the stories from 4,500 sources it aggregates on its Google News service -- namely, those individuals or groups who are mentioned in the stories. Unlike Digg, another news aggregation site where users can comment on and rank stories, prospective commenters on Google News stories must e-mail their comments to Google, along with proof of identity. The company will then try to independently assess the identity of the individual.

Redmond, Wash. - Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it has signed a three-year deal to become the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising for Digg, the popular news aggregation site that attracts 17 million monthly unique users. Digg's current advertising partner, Federated Media, will still work with Microsoft on integrated programs. "Our collaboration with Digg is about bringing our advertising technology and sales force to one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web and a true innovator in user-generated content," said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services group.

San Francisco - Pownce, a social network and file-sharing application start-up created by Digg founder Kevin Rose, this week announced the launch of a private beta test of its service, Wired News reported. The service lets users send messages, links, files of various types, and events to one another for free; an ad-free version that increases file upload limits will also be available for $20 per year.

Amsterdam - News aggregation site Digg plans to expand its service to include images, product reviews and other topics of interest to a more general audience, according to comments made by Digg founder Kevin Rose at the TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam, Wired News reported. Up to this point, Digg users -- who post links to stories from around the Web and rank their relative importance -- have primarily shown their interests to include stories related to technology, politics, business and video games.

Two weeks ago, Google News fell behind Digg.com in share of UK visits to News and Media websites. Yahoo! News UK & Ireland ranks at #4, Digg.com at #6 and Google News UK at #7 among News and Media websites. However, looking at website visits alone tells only half the story.

London - The developers of anti-piracy technology used on next-generation DVDs plan to pursue the thousands of websites that have published a software key that can crack the security, the BBC reported.