MySpace is entering the social news category. This follows FaceBook's entry with a social bookmarking feature earlier this year.

It's certainly additional validation for Blue Dot's market. Will it hurt us competitively? Maybe. But there are a lot of people that wouldn't be caught dead on MySpace. It's also seems to be more directly competitive with Digg and NewsVine.

Quoted: Now, the big question is what this thing is going to look like. If it's anything like the rest of MySpace, with slow page loads, flashing banner ads, and Web 1.0 design, you won't catch me using it.

Blog post looks like raw notes from Kevin Rose's talk at Future of Web Apps.

Quoted: Picking out patterns in the chaos

"The Dig", a 1994 video game, and "Digg.com". Can't tell the difference? Maybe Lucas is going to make a movie or sequel to their game and want to ensure they still have trademark rights.

But this is just stupid. What a waste of time.

Quote: users seem more confused about someone suggesting they don't know the difference between the news website and the video game nobody plays.

Microsoft is launching a Social News service - MSN Reporter. First available in Norway and Belgium (?)

A little bit of bull shit (and hubris) from Kevin Rose. How can he claim that they think that no stories have gotten to the digg home page except for "natural" diggs from users (as opposed to those with ulterior motives colluding to game the system).

I would presume that there are many VERY SOPHISTICATED user groups out there that are doing EXACTLY what he claims is not happening (and they have no clue that it's going on).

So, even though that SAY that paying top diggers has "no effect" on getting a story submitted, they are now REMOVING the top digger list from the site to make it harder for marketers to contact them.

What I do agree with, is that fighting spammers for a service like Blue Dot Buzz (and Digg) will be an ongoing arms race. We've only been out a week with Buzz - and we're already having to beef up our tools for fighting spam.

BTW, Kevin says Digg has 5,000 submissions per day (Blue Dot has 1,000) and 900,000 registered users (Blue Dot has over 10,000). So even though we have just 1% of their registered user base, we have 20% of the "story" submissions (and I would venture on a broader variety of topics since our users are looking for anything of interest on the web, not just news, and not just limited to the 50 or so fixed categories that digg forces you to submit to).

Doing some math from # of diggs (below) - we can calculate that each story gets an average of about 13 diggs).

Quoted: We strongly believe attempts to game Digg are ineffective. While it would be foolish to say that Digg has never been artificially manipulated in the 2+ years (50,000,000+ diggs) we’ve been live, we’re confident that such attempts do not impact the content that reaches the home page. We work hard every day to develop tools and systems that guard against this behavior. Whether someone is paid or chooses to try to “break” Digg, it’s irrelevant– our systems can tell when it’s happening. Stories reach the home page only when enough legitimate users have put them there. Even if someone were paid to submit or digg a story that reached the home page, what many don’t realize is the combination of factors that ultimately led to that story getting there. The factors and the algorithm are constantly being tweaked to reflect the diversity of the Digg audience as well as to guard against manipulative behavior. At the end of the day, we work constantly to ensure that the broader Digg community gets to decide what makes it to the home page.

Digg goes back to the trough.

Quoted: In a recent interview with the Digg executive team, they said that they are not yet cash flow positive but should be in the near future, and currently have 18 employees.

TechCrunch coverage of New York Times's new partner links. I don't see them live yet on NYT - though it's supposed to be today.

John Cook broke a story about New York Times adding links to Digg, and NewsVine.

Monthly Unique Visitors comparison:
Blue Dot - 100,000
Newsvine - 560,000
Digg - 1,600,000

Quoted: Newsvine is the smallest of the three that The New York Times is working with. It attracted about 560,000 unique visitors last month, a 19 percent increase over the previous month, according to its internal numbers.