Normally when a website relaunches after a drastic change, particularly after a buyout as Digg was purchased by Betaworks last month, there is a bump in traffic from the buzz surrounding the launch as well as the curious former users who had left the site long before. The exact opposite occurred for Digg when Betaworks launched V1 on July 31st according to traffic tracking site Alexa. The site was down for several hours in the morning as they migrated causing some of the traffic loss, but it should have been followed by a spike in traffic enough to bring it above where it was the previous days. It did…

It was either one of the weirdest things the Digg founder ever did or a brilliant troll move against the community that helped to kill his former site. First, an AMA (ask me anything) was posted in the popular r/IAmA subreddit followed by the link being Tweeted out by Rose to verify its validity.  3,000 upvotes and 1,181 comments later, Rose hadn’t answered a single question. The Reddit account, oddly enough, was created 5 days prior to the launch of Digg V4 in 2010, and has not posted or commented until this. Some believe that Reddit contributed to the demise of Digg after the V4 launch when Reddit…

For those of us who have used Digg daily for the past 5 years, seeing the image above when visiting the site is both exhilarating and terrifying. It has our blood pumping because it represents a new hope, a chance to salvage what’s left of the once-dominant social news site. It’s also scary as it could mark the official beginning of the end for an old friend. For their part, Betaworks has done a great job at communicating with the community and keeping their plans relatively transparent. In their last post, they offered up screen shots of some of the earlier designs and concepts behind the site, some…

Put aside that the site was sold for a tiny amount relative to where it was a couple of years ago. Forget the fact that it still gets strong traffic and sends a decent number of visitors to various websites across the internet. Lastly, pretend like there’s no shame in being on top of the social news world at one point. Moving forward, is it better for Betaworks to take what they’ve done so far with News.me and other technologies and rebuild Digg as an advanced version of what it once was, or should they scrap the concept that Digg has focused on over the years and take the site in a completely different direction?…

Digg isn’t the first social media site to fall. MySpace collapsed under their own weight. Other social news sites like Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, and Mixx never got the traction they needed. Facebook pushed out a lot of would-be social networks over the years. When Betaworks bought Digg for a ridiculously-low amount, it didn’t mark the first failure of a social media giant. It was just the first time a social media giant fell for no apparent reason. Digg had the traffic. It had the buzz. It had the personality. It made one major misstep with the roll out of V4, but otherwise their faults were not any bigger…

Betaworks, a New York technology development firm that has had its eyes set on news distribution for some time, has purchased former social new powerhouse Digg.com for $500,000, sources close to the matter told the Wall Street Journal. Betaworks founder John Borthwick will be the new CEO of Digg. “I’ve always been a fan of John’s product vision and the companies he builds, funds, and advises,” said Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg. “John understands the real-time nature of the web and how to capture and surface trends as they occur. Given his experience with bit.ly, news.me, and Chartbeat I can’t…

Kevin Rose has always been known as an “ideas guy”. His ventures haven’t always paid off as well as they could have with Revision3, Pownce, and Milk all selling for less than many would have thought and with Digg dropping out of prominence in the social news arena, but he’s tasted success with all of them at one point or another. Google is banking on that by moving him to Google Ventures after trying him out on the Google+ team for a short stint. Rose has had success in picking winners with a portfolio that has include Twitter, path, OMGPOP, and Foursquare. Three-year-old Google Ventures claims to have…

It looks like Pinterest. It acts like Digg. The newest player in the social media sphere adds some features from Stumbleupon and Twitter to the mix to form Thruzt, now entering into public beta. Unlike many of its predecessors, Thruzt encourages networks to be formed within the community to draw attention to submissions. Users select content on the web that they find valuable or write up their own stories on their blogs and submit it to Thruzt. Then, the “game” is on to get it enough votes to get popular. The first thing people will notice when visiting is that the layout is very similar to Pinterest….

One of the grandfathers of social news may be on the selling block as Geeknet announced today that they were evaluating “strategic alternatives” for their online media business that includes Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode. They may be for sale soon. Then again, Geeknet may decide to invest more into them. It’s one way or the other as the current model is not profitable. The company showed a net loss of $2.1 million in the first quarter of 2012 despite having nearly 50 million visitors per month to the sites. “After much discussion, our management team and Board of Directors have decided…

I was struck by something when I began reading Digg’s list of its “Ten stories you’ll be sorry you missed this year.” None of the stories had anything to do with tech. Oh, how times have changed. When Digg launched in 2004, it was almost completely a tech site, much like its predecessor, Slashdot. It was a place where people shared, commented and voted on the latest and greatest stories in tech and science. Part of the reason Digg quickly expanded its reach is because it did grow beyond its roots. By 2007, the Offbeat category was extremely popular and memes and quirky humor was as much at home on the site…