“It’s even easier to access Digg on the go with the new mobile version of Digg,” stated Jeff Hodson. “This enhanced version - found at m.digg.com - is perfect for phones that support the full web browsing experience, such as a Treo, Blackberry or that new iPhone you just waited in line all morning to get.”

Now Digg is available for those who use Windows Mobile.  I currently have a Motorola Q and was getting frustrated by the lack of functionality that Digg had when loading the site on the phone.  That problem has just been solved.

http://m.digg.com is able to show multiple views of popular stories.  If the story is tagged on YouTube, the video can be played on the iPhone.  Digg Mobile has the ability for users to favorites stories when logged in.  More comments can be loaded when browsing through stories.  And now that there is less JavaScript used on Digg Mobile, pages load faster.  Most important, the Digg It feature actually works on the mobile version.

Here are pictures of what Digg looked like before creating the mobile version:

And here is what Digg Mobile looks like now:

Related Links:
1. Digg Blog
2. Mashable

  
Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) was rumored to have talks on and off with in acquiring Digg for roughly $200 million.  Marissa Meyer, Vice President of Product Management believed Digg would be able complement Google News.  Today is was reported that Google walked away from the deal.

Why did Google walk away?  A couple of TechCrunch sources reported that Google walked away during the technical due diligence stage or because they thought that the personalities of Digg’s board of directors wouldn’t align well with Google’s.  ValleyWag pointed out that Mayer announced this past Wednesday that Google News accounts for $100 million in Google’s revenue.  Therefore, Google News is doing fine either way, so why buy Digg?

Now that Google has turned down Digg, what will Kevin Rose do next?  Digg hired Allen & Co. to help with finding additional investments or finding a buyer.  Digg’s current revenue model is advertising.  Microsoft brokers the advertisements currently embedded on Digg.

Related Links:
1. TechCrunch
2. ValleyWag

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) subsidiary and one of the biggest Digg copycats that I have seen thus far, Propeller has relaunched into a lamer version than it’s 1.0 version.  When the site relaunched this morning, Propeller got rid of the Digg-like voting scheme, but the site is now telling their users to “Prop It,” also known as voting for stories to make it to the homepage.  The site is now using a scale of 1-10 for their stories.

Members of the new Propeller can create groups too.  Some of the most recently created groups are Firefox, Offbeat, Britney Spears, StumbleUpon, Jovial’s Group, Make Money Online, google, Organization, 90210, and Autos. 

Propeller categories include Arts/Entertainment, Business/Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science/Technology, Sports, and Style.  When a story makes it to the homepage of Propeller, they appear on the homepages of AOL and AOL News too. 

The biggest flaw that the new Propeller has right now is that they are giving their community too much power.  Spammers will be having a party with that ability.  The new Propeller site is pretty ugly too.  Simpletons using the site will not be able to tell what part of the site is a text ad and what part is actually content.  I really think that this site needs a major design overhaul.

The concept of Propeller first started on Netscape.com.  The idea was led by Jason Calacanis.  Calacanis hired several top users on Digg, Reddit, Flickr, and Newsvine to drive the top stories on Netscape.com.  Kevin Rose, founder of Digg called out Calacanis for doing this, but later the two ended their feud.  The voting idea was killed off of Netscape.com and then later moved to Propeller.   

Any thoughts on the new Propeller?  Comment away.

Related Links:
Propeller
TechCrunch

When Digg first introduced shouting capabilities, I ruled it out as a stupid feature because I thought it was nothing but e-mail spam.  In many circumstances it is still spam, depending on the users that you allow shouts from.  But now I have realized that shouts have value to them.

Eye-For-An-Eye / Frienemies
I treat digg shouts as an eye-for-an-eye system.  If you digg my interesting stories, I digg back your interesting stories.  Simple as that.  Now you have to be careful with who you add as friends.  I’ll call the bad friends “frienemies.”  Frienemies are the ones that send you shouts in your inbox and you digg the interesting stories that they send, but they don’t reciprocate.  You have to become skillful at identifying who the frienemies are right away and remove them from your friends list.

This can be monitored after submitting articles and finding out which of your friends dugg your story and which of your friends have not within 48 hours.

(more…)

The talk of the blogging town is that The Associated Press sent a cease and desist to 7 DMCA takedown notices to The Drudge Retort.  However, Jim Kennedy, VP and Strategy Director of The Associated Press rethought their position and felt they acted “heavy-handed.”  The Associated Press will be rethinking their position on bloggers.  The shift in policy happened shortly after the blogosphere reacted negatively to the AP’s stance.

Jay Adelson’s Stance On The A.P.
Not everyone reacted negatively towards the AP.  “While I definitely love the idea of syndication and democratization of information, I tend to sympathize with the A.P.,” Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg and Chairman of Revision3 told The New York Times. “It is their decision how their content gets used.”

“The way we designed Digg was to protect copyright owners, not abuse them,” added Adelson. “Digg’s job is to direct you to the source.”

Sometimes Digg receives requests to take down posts that violate DMCA copyright protection and they conform.  It doesn’t happen often, but it still happens.  Digg users that constantly violate DMCA copyright infringement gets their account banned.  Reddit has never received a DMCA copyright infrigement takedown notice.

———
Update:  Jay Adelson added this as a comment in response to the article [Thanks Sebastian (comment #1).
A couple of clarifications:

1) We are not supporting A.P.’s position, by any stretch. I mean by my comment that we honor copyright law and ownership, which is why Digg doesn’t host content in the first place, merely directs to it.

2) We enforce copyright infractions when we receive an official and verifiable DMCA takedown notice. Our process is totally transparent – when we act on such a notice, we direct the original links to Chilling Effects where the notice can be viewed.
———

Jason Calacanis’ Stance On The A.P.
Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo on the other hand, has a difference in opinion from Adelson.  Calacani stated:

“We’ve never had a policy for this at Netscape or Mahalo because it is absurd, and we don’t waste time making rules for absurd behavior. If you’re linking to someone with their headline it’s clearly a small fraction of the overall work, used for navigational purposes, doesn’t confuse the public, and doesn’t impinge on the originators ability to do commerce. If the case passes all those tests with flying colors than you’re just abusing the legal system. If you were to take EVERY SINGLE AP news headline and quite 200-300 words automatically I could see them complaining, but we’re talking about 20-80 word quotes.”

My Stance On The A.P.
Traditional media outlets have been taking a hit lately since the rise of enterprise blogging.  Everyone is stealing content from everyone else and making it their own.  If you quoted all of my original material and did not link back to my site, I’d obviously be pissed too.

If The Drudge Report did not link directly to the Associated Press or did not even mention that the work belong to the Associated Press, then they acted unfairly and deserved the DMCA takedown notice.

By linking back to the original owner of the material, it is ethical because you are telling the reader that the content on your site does not exclusively belong to you.  And linking to the original owner is beneficial for your traffic ranking and drives more people to your site.  This also leads to higher monetization.  And who in their right mind says no to extra money that someone helps you make?

There has been many instances where the media was duped by bloggers and marketers.  Between Engadget, YouTube users, and Internet marketers, false information has been known to spread across the Internet and on TV.

Engadget wrote an article that said the iPhone and Apple’s operating system would be delayed and this caused Apple’s market cap to temporarily drop by $4 billion.  The creators of YouTube user, LonelyGirl15 duped YouTube users into thinking that the videos generated on that site were about a teenage girl named Bree, but her name is actually Jessica Rose.  And today, Wired discovered that Lyndon Antcliff lied about a story that made it on the frontpage of Digg and spread across the media.

Lyndon Antcliff wrote up a fake story about an anoymous 13 year old boy in Texas that stole his dad’s credit card, went on a $30,000 shopping spree, and ordered hookers to a hotel only for the purpose of playing Halo on XBox.  Antcliff also mentioned in the article that the kid convinced the hookers that he was a circus midget in case of being suspected that the kid was too young.

This information made it onto FOX News and the anchor argued that the prostitute should have been arrested, even though the prositute never actually existed. 

“The thing is, I tried to make it as ridiculous as possible so it would be obvious that it would be fake,” stated Antcliff.  Now all publications that carry the story have parody disclaimers.  Antcliff’s story received roughly 6,000 trackbacks.

“It’s been a lesson in the power of social media and the power of people suspending their disbelief. [Traditional news organizations] are always banging about how inaccurate blogs are, but in this case, it was the opposite,” added Antcliff.

Digg.com, the user-generated news web site is known for the famous homepage stories and the witty comments made by the user community. Everything gets voted on including the quality of the comments. If your comment is not good enough for the community, they’ll vote it down and it gets buried.

Digg will be removing a lot of the AJAX features from the site to increase load time. All comments will have permalinks tied to them so that people can link directly to them from their websites and social networks. Comments also load as users scroll down instead of preloading them before the site loads. Users can delete their comments anytime compared to before when comments were permanent.

Comments will also have a sorting system. Users will be able to sort comments based on oldest first, newest first, controversial, vigorous, and most dugg.

Below is a video clip of Kevin Rose narrating the new features:

“Normally our policy is to not comment about things like this, but this morning’s rumors about a bidding war involving Google and Microsoft have created such a stir we feel compelled to tell you all directly that they are completely inaccurate,” stated Digg CEO, Jay Adelson.  “Sorry to burst any drama theories, but they aren’t true. We remain focused on improving Digg and rolling out great features”
[Source: Digg the Blog]

Yesterday, Mike Arrington wrote an article about how Google and Microsoft may be in talks for acquiring Digg.  The rivalry that Microsoft and Google have with each other is so intense that I would not be surprised if this rumor was true.  Google signed an exclusive advertisement deal with MySpace.  So Microsoft responded by doing the same for Facebook.  Google bought DoubleClick, an online advertising company for a couple billion.  Microsoft paid a lot more for aQuantive, also an online advertising company.  Microsoft also bought an exclusive advertisement deal with Digg and made a $44 billion offer to acquire Yahoo!  This made Google slightly jittery.

This is why I would not be shocked if Google is making a bid for Digg, especially since the company is a hot Internet property.  Digg is in the top 200 on Alexa.  They have a few million users.  They have a video program that complements the show called Diggnation (via Revision3.com).  Most importantly, Digg aggregates the best content on the Internet at the expense of their users’ time.  Digg users often bicker and complain when some of their power is taken away from them (Top Digger list, tweaked algorithms, administrative removal of stories, etc.).  But their users keep coming back for more.

To further promote the likelihood of the acquisition talks, Digg hired Allen & Co.  Digg was supposedly shopping for deals between $200-$300 million.  And Google is rumored to be willing to spend $200-$225 million according to TechCrunch.  Will Google make a bid?  If so, will Microsoft respond?  Stay tuned.  And you stay classy, P2 readers.

“Just wanted to give everyone some insight into some of the changes we’ve been making this week. As we’ve talked about in the past, Digg’s promotional algorithm ensures that the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page. Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page,” wrote Kevin Rose on Digg the Blog.

First you get the Digg credibility, then you get the Digg friends, then you get the Digg power. The Digg Mafia, also known as the top users of Digg that generates 30%-50% of Digg’s front page content, is not amused with the new algorithm. The new algorithm gives the Digg Mafia less power.

And because of this, they wrote an open letter to the Digg team as noted by ValleyWag. Besides the fact that Digg has secret editors and auto-buries, the top users feel that Digg has problems with:
1.) Lack of communication and disregard for the Digg community
2.) Unexplained and unacknowledged banning of top users
3.) Lack of transparency - Digg only shows you the stories that people have dugg, but not the ones that are buried.
4.) The auto-bury list - For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever.
5.) Repeated and flagrant disrespect of its top users

Top Digg users have demonstrated how much power they have had in the past. It will be interesting to see who responds first, Digg management or The Digg Mafia.