Digg rumored to be in buyout talks with the Washington Post
Longtime buyout rumor monger Digg is once again said to be on the auction block, this time in a potential deal with the Washington Post.
Social news site and Web 2.0 darling Digg is once again rumored to be in talks to be acquired.
The site, which lets users vote up stories that other users and media companies submit to the Web, has reportedly caught the eye of the Washington Post, the Next Web reports.
Citing "tips from multiple sources," TNW offers that Digg "may have found a suitor" with the newspaper company and its WaPo Labs group. That's the same group that currently has its own social news tool with the Social Reader Facebook application.
Both companies have declined to comment on the report.
Well-versed readers might recognize this as merely the latest suggestion that Digg is about to be snapped up by a bigger media fish. One $100 million offer from former Vice President Al Gore would have made Digg part of Gore's Current Media, and another from Google in 2008 would have valued the company in the ballpark of $200 million. Google reportedly walked away from that one in its final stages. Other rumored suitors at the time included Microsoft and two unidentified media companies.
Digg rose to fame shortly after its launch in 2004. The site garnered attention primarily for its algorithm, which would analyze user votes and decide which stories would hit the front page, where other users would then see them -- often for the first time. After several years of growth -- including that of competitors -- Digg laid off 10 percent of its workforce in 2009, scaling back by another 37 percent later that same year.
More recently, the company says it has found success via Facebook, a company that could be considered a competitor. In a post on the company's blog last month, Digg said Facebook has bumped up unique visitors to its mobile site by some 29 percent since December. And earlier this month, Digg said its Facebook Timeline app was now bringing in more than 1 million monthly active users.
Update at 5:30 p.m. PT: TechCrunch offers up that the Washington Post has, in fact, hired the Digg team, but without acquiring "the site or the technology" -- if that makes anything more clear. We'll update here if we learn more.
Updated at 5 p.m. PT with additional background.