ReadWriteWeb

Just in time for the first day of the Democratic Convention in the U.S., Kevin Rose today announced a new feature on Digg: Digg Dialogg. The idea here is to allow the Digg community to submit questions that will then later be posed during interviews with "thought leaders and tastemakers." The first person to be interviewed this way is going to be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The interview will be streamed live online on Wednesday the 27th.

Yahoo! Buzz, the social news service that launched in February and delivered giant piles of traffic to the lucky few websites that were indexed by the site, is tonight opening up to submissions from any site across the web. We warned that Buzz could eat Digg's lunch and that's never felt as true as it does tonight. The roll out of new open functionality will extend throughout the evening.

All the excitement aside, the most logical question to ask is this: will links that get rewarded by prominent placement on Buzz or even on the Yahoo.com front page be selected democratically by the votes of Buzz users? We don't think there's any reason to believe they will.

After 4 months of private, invite-only alpha testing, social news network Socialmedian is now open and available in a public beta. During the last 4 months, Socialmedian has taken its motto of shipping fast and iterating faster quite seriously. Today, the service looks nothing like it did 4 months ago when we first reviewed it. Since then, Socialmedian has added a large number of new features and made the UI a lot more functional.

According to various reports from the last Digg Townhall/meetup this week, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced that Digg will soon let its users create and manage their own 'sub-Diggs.' Digg's main competitors like reddit and Mixx have already given their users this ability, and Digg has been rumored to start adding this feature for a while.

Social media, it's all about the democratization of communication and empowering new voices - right? A few years into the new media revolution, reality is looking a little more complicated than that theory would suggest.

The wild garden of services growing from the read/write soil of the new web struggles each time a new app is launched and looks more like a ghost town than a place to enjoy the network effect of the crowd. How can new services ramp up social connections quickly? Recommending "friendship" with active early adopters is one strategy being explored by a number of sites. The end result can be a lopsided environment where a handful of winners dominate the collective mindshare - again.

In the competitive social news market, Digg has gotten a lot of attention for its recommendation engine and Mixx continues to release new features (it has launched communities and an API recently). However it seems like Reddit is not getting the attention it deserves. Its open source initiative was well received, but there are other interesting aspects to Reddit.

Here's a look at why the idea of a social news site front page that is newspaper-like and presents information in reverse chronological presentation has to change - and how Reddit is flirting with the answer.

After months of promises (and third party tools), Digg finally announced this week that their recommendation engine is to be released. Today, Digg has delivered the goods to private beta testers. Here are the first screenshots of the new digg recommendation engine features, along with a video guide.

Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on 'groups,' but the Mixx Communities take this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.

There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx's efforts add some interesting ideas to this.

Launched a couple of weeks ago by U.S. Representative John R. Kuhl, Jr., a Republican from New York's 29th District, the "Fix Washington" project aims to make DC politics a user generated affair. Noting that the majority of Americans aren't happy with the way Washington is run, Kuhl is soliciting ideas for bills until July 18th. Kuhl will then choose his favorite 5 submissions and users will vote for the best, and the winning idea will be introduced on the floor of the US House of Representatives. It's a novel idea, certainly, but is it a good one?

The wonderful Information Aesthetics blog points us to human-computer interaction student Chris Harrison's Digg Rings visualization. Digg Rings is the latest in a series of awesome visualization projects from Harrison, and it displays a year's worth of Digg data in an absolutely stunning manner. These are interactive visualizations like those from Digg Labs, but they're equally beautiful and would make one heck of a poster.