digg

AUSTIN, Texas--It would be very clear to an uninitiated bystander at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) this week that the annual nerdstravaganza is full of people talking about a zillion location-based social-networking applications.

There are the various campaigns and tie-ins for rival check-in services Foursquare and Gowalla, the local-deals promo from iPhone app Whrrl, and the litany of "where is everyone?" mash-ups perhaps best personified by Vicarious.ly, an uber-aggregator of Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins from Austin as well as just about every other sort of social-media updates coming out of SXSWi. Developed by SimpleGeo, another … Read more

Today's BOL happened before a live studio audience at SXSW in Austin, TX. Cali Lewis and Nicole Lee joined us on stage to discuss the state of SXSW Interactive, the on-going Google/China kerfuffle, and pharmaceutical companies' struggles to fit the risks of drugs into a Twitter-friendly 140 characters. Also, Cali Lewis nearly loses a toe.... um, sorry?

Digg 2.0 unveiled at SXSW: “faster,” “instant” http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20000411-52.html

AT&T’s network up to SXSW iPhone … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Digg announced at its annual South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) party Saturday night that it will soon launch a significantly revamped version of its service that is faster and has instant Digging and instant submissions.

Just before Digg founder Kevin Rose and his Diggnation partner Alex Albrecht took the stage at Stubb's BBQ here, CEO Jay Adelson got in front of the audience of hundreds and took the opportunity to introduce, for the first time, what he said was "five years" of major work on the popular headline aggregation system.

Among the new features, Adelson said, … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Did you hear that Conan O'Brien, fresh off his ugly divorce with NBC, is joining Internet TV network Revision3, home to the mega-hit Diggnation?

That was the hot word blasting across Twitter Saturday night, with 426 tweets posted with the hashtag #omgconan in just four hours. The first tweet with the news, from @jimraymonds, hit just after 8 p.m. local time: "Holy [cow] Conan is on Revision3."

And the flood picked up from there: "Wow, Conan is actually joining Revision3!" wrote @tuckerman just seconds later. And then, quickly, "Conan O'brien just … Read more

What does the maelstrom of hype around the launch of Apple's tablet device have in common with Google's announcement that select Sundance Film Festival titles will be available for rent on YouTube, or Digg founder Kevin Rose's comments to the U.K.'s Telegraph newspaper that the social news site he founded has "drastic" changes ahead?

A lot, actually. They're all signs that for the first time since the social media craze started to explode a few years ago, the emphasis is finally on "media."

Thank goodness: we'd had enough time … Read more

Social news site Digg relaunched its Firefox extension on Tuesday, adding a small number of iterative improvements. The company also launched an extension for Google's Chrome browser, which lets users see if a story has been submitted to Digg, as well as vote on it--all without leaving the page.

Both extensions show a count of how many Diggs a story has if it has been submitted, as well as a speedy way to submit links if they haven't. They also let users share any page they're on, not just through Digg, but on social networks like Twitter … Read more

Wow. Numbers crunched by traffic and uptime firm Pingdom indicate that Facebook is absolutely crushing the rest of the social Web in terms of monthly page views. With about 260 billion page views, the sprawling social network's page view count is 11 times bigger than the second-place entry, News Corp.-owned MySpace. It's also 59 times higher than Twitter's, which comes in fourth. (Social network and gaming site Hi5 is third; Friendster, which was recently sold to a Malaysian tech company, is in fifth.)

These numbers are a testament to Facebook's phenomenal growth: remember, as late … Read more

Digg on Wednesday introduced a small change to its developer API that could have a big effect on the need to visit Digg.com.

The company is now allowing third parties extended write access to the site, which will give users the option to Digg and bury both stories and comments from outside applications. Short of allowing users to submit and comment on stories, these new changes will provide much of the same experience as visiting Digg.com with whatever interface third-party developers have created.

Along those same lines, the company has also launched a reference page for what developers … Read more

NEW YORK--You had two options if you wanted to hang out with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Web 2.0 Expo conference this week: head over to the lobby bar of the trendy Standard Hotel on Monday night, where Digg was picking up the tab for several dozen of the city's blogger elite; or pack into Manhattan Center Studios on Tuesday night along with about a thousand other young, predominantly male New Yorkers for a live taping of Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht's "Diggnation" video show.

Those are, after all, the two Diggs. There's … Read more