ReadWriteWeb

Digg has had one heck of a week. On Wednesday the social news aggregator decided it was a good time to make the switch to version 4 of its platform, which sent servers crashing and drove users bonkers. That was followed with overwhelming outrage over the buggy and feature-stripped new site, and today loyal Digg users spammed the site pleading for founder Kevin Rose to "do the right thing." This afternoon, Rose responded to the Digg community on his personal blog, announcing the return of features like "Upcoming Stores."

Yesterday we reported on the launch of Digg's latest iteration of it's social news platform. Due to server problems that hampered much of Digg's functionality (including commenting), many users chose to voice their opinions here on ReadWriteWeb. Yesterday we asked you to let us know how you felt about the new Digg, and boy did you ever. The vast majority of comments - both here and on other sites including Digg - are those of disgust and anger over the new Digg, as many believe the site's core functionality has been inexplicably stripped away.

Trailblazing social news site Digg relaunched with a much-anticipated new version today and it was a busy day behind the scenes. This photo of the Relaunch War Room at Digg headquarters was shared on Twitter by Digg's Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards this afternoon. Another, from Kevin Rose's iPhone, is posted below. The day was not without technical challenges.

Are these photos of the rebirth of a more effective Digg, finally achieving the personalization company leaders have long said they sought, or scenes from the decline of yesterday's online empire - surpassed by new social networks that will in time fade away as well? Only time will tell.

For a few months now, Digg has been beta testing a radically new version of its popular social news aggregation site. Those lucky enough to secure an invitation have been experimenting with Digg's new social focused "My News" section which provides curated news feeds based on the activity of your friends and the people you choose to follow. Today, Digg has flipped the switch and launched version 4 to the public, but it hasn't been a smooth transition.

Less than a month ago, we told you about how social bookmarking and discovery service StumbleUpon has quietly grown into a Web behemoth, driving nearly twice as much traffic as its closest competitor, Digg. One of the things that makes the service stand out from the others is its ability to learn your habits and tastes to feed you relevant links upon which to stumble. Today, the service is brining the serendipity of its recommendation engine to a smartphone near you with boredom-killing apps for the iPhone and Android.

There's something rotten going on at massive social news site Digg. A sprawling campaign of political conservatives working together on secret mailing lists to orchestrate systematic burying of news stories and other users believed to be politically liberal has been uncovered by an investigation published on today on Alternet.

Report author Ole Ole Olson focused on a group called Digg Patriots, which he alleges used a now-deleted Yahoo Groups email list to distribute bury orders for more than 40,000 stories over the past 15 months. In addition to explicitly liberal political articles, "articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations are targets," Olson writes.

Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures." (emphasis ours)

Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community.

The new version of Digg has changed the playing field for two of its biggest constituents: power users and publishers. We discuss this with a long-time Digg power user.

The latest version of social news site Digg is currently in restricted beta, with an additional 20,000 users added at the beginning of July. The new version adds the ability to "follow" people or publishers via a feature called "My News." This will be the default Digg home page, and it's prompted many to compare the new Digg to Twitter and Facebook. Another big change is that publishers may now automatically submit their content. This changes the game for both power users and publishers, because previously the secret to getting onto the Digg front page was for a power user to submit the story. That's no longer the case.

You may feel like all the tech press has talked about this week is Apple's new iPhone 4. If you thought that was literally the case, though, you'd be wrong. We did some counting and dividing and looked at the number of headlines containing the words Apple or iPhone across a number of online news outlets this week: Techmeme, Google News, Digg and the finest tech blog in the land, ReadWriteWeb.

Our conclusion? The media is talking about plenty of other things! There were also some surprises in the numbers. We also spoke with Gabe Rivera, founder of tech news blog aggregator Techmeme, whom we caught red-handed being more Apple-centric than any of these other sources. Even his site talks less about Apple than we expected, though.

Ever since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the subsequent and ongoing spilling of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the public has been asking many questions. Who is to blame? How long will it take to stop the leak? How much irrevocable damage has been done? Thankfully, YouTube may be the best platform to get answers to these questions straight from the horse's mouth.