Social News, Social Media | featured news

Currently, the “New Digg” is facing a host of problems. Digg has 14 million pages indexed in Google, those pages are now 404′ed. Digg’s entire database of archived content vanished over night, including now-defunct user profiles. In one swift move, they’ve completely eliminated the community by removing each and every user account to exist,with little explanation and no answer to when users will be getting their accounts back.

Digg rose to prominence years ago by changing the way people share news online. But its subsequent downfall – and $500,000 sale to Betaworks on Thursday – underscores the swift evolution of technology that is helping people discover content online.

Believe it or not, it's been seven years since Digg launched. To date, we've had over 350M Diggs, 28M Story Submissions and 40M Comments. We're extremely proud to have helped pioneer social voting on the web.

Reddit has lifted its ban on popular news publication The Atlantic, thus allowing its users to submit links to the community news sharing site once again. The news publication — along with BusinessWeek, Phys.org, GlobalPost, Discovery News, ScienceDaily, and others — was first put on a domain blacklist by Reddit about a month ago, as VentureBeat previously reported. Reddit management determined that these sites were guilty of artificially promoting their content on the site.

The front page of the internet has a new CEO. Reddit has chosen Yishan Wong to fill the online community’s top spot. Wong will oversee reddit.com, redditgifts.com, and reddit.tv. Writing at the reddit blog, Wong made the announcement, noting that he didn’t think, at first, that he would be a serious candidate for the position.

Once the shark is jumped, the downfall begins, and a social media site loses relevance, it's officially over for them. MySpace, Propeller, Yahoo! Buzz, Pownce, Mixx -- the list of social sites that couldn't turn it around goes on and on. Digg is proving to be the exception and it's an important twist for every social media site alive today.

With the release of the new Digg on August 25th, anybody with the ability to understand how a story, which is promoted to the popular section, is composed, has an edge in attaining viral exposure ranging from tens of thousands to millions of pageviews. Diggs users constitute a large proportion of bloggers. Thus stories promoted to their popular section, which was previously their homepage and now the Top News page, can attain anywhere from less than 10 to hundreds of links pointing to their websites.

BNO News, the news wire service famous for publishing breaking news stories through its @BreakingNews Twitter feed, just announced that it plans to launch a new news wire service early next year.

On a day when Microsoft announced 5,000 layoffs, the 7 or so people losing their jobs at Digg may seem like a drop in the bucket. But that represents about about 10 percent of Digg's 75-person workforce, whereas the 5,000 at Microsoft represents 5 percent.