ReadWriteWeb

No, it's not all commenters on Digg. Or on YouTube. Or, or, or.

But a whole lot of them seem to be lying in wait to sink their teeth into the nearest virtual pantleg... or exposed jugular. The culture of vehement attack and merciless ridicule is still virulent in a lot of places online. (The whole "You Suck At..." meme is only the latest example.)

In an interesting nugget of Friday afternoon news, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has posted an article featuring a preview of the upcoming fourth version of the social news site Digg. Founder Kevin Rose has published a glorious 1080p video to YouTube aimed at explaining the new features to publishers. Among the most interesting features is the inclusion of social network contacts into the Digg ecosystem, as well as the ability for publishers to auto-publish stories to Digg via an RSS feed.

Monday's sudden departure of Jay Adelson as CEO of social news aggregator Digg has raised a few eyebrows in the tech community as some rumors imply that it may have been a decision made by the company's board. Regardless of the nature of the breakup, it got me thinking about the dichotomous relationship some startups have between founders and CEOs, and which, if either, is more expendable.

Yesterday, Jay Adelson stepped down as the CEO of Digg and was replaced by the company's founder Kevin Rose. Soon after this change of guard, Kevin Rose announced some sweeping changes for Digg. First of all, the controversial DiggBar, an iFrame toolbar Digg introduced one year ago, will be replaced by basic links from the Digg homepage again. Second, Digg will unban all previously banned domains. All of these changes will go into effect once Digg v4 launches in a few months.

Digg released its official iPhone app this morning and in many ways it's more usable than the website itself. The app is a little buggy, doesn't allow you to post comments and doesn't include the video or images section of the site - but it's still quite good.

The best is likely to come as the app's login process points to the next version of Digg as a platform. In that future scenario, top stories will be surfaced faster and more to your liking by integrating links shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, there are a number of reasons I'm more likely to use this new app than I am to visit Digg.com.

Last night, during Digg's annual SXSW party, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced a set of significant changes to Digg. Among the changes Adelson announced are a streamlined submission process, a personalized homepage, an unlimited amount of topic pages, a new commenting system and better curation tools. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to sit down with Adelson to discuss these changes in greater detail. Some of these changes will surely be extremely controversial in the Digg community and might also make some publishers who rely on Digg's traffic a bit nervous.

Digg and Revision3 co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have provided crowdsourcing startup 3Crowd Technologies and its founder Barrett Lyon with an early Christmas present of funding.

Lyon says the angel investors join Storm Ventures and Greenwich Technology Associates to "give 3Crowd the shot in the arm it needs to take off," likely sometime early next year.

Later today, Digg will open up its rumored read/write API. Up until now, developers could only read data from Digg. With the new API, web and desktop apps will also be able to contribute data to Digg. This will allow developers to write desktop and web applications that enable users to, for example, interact with Digg without having to go to the site. Digg will use the OAuth protocol to authorize applications. According to Forbes' Taylor Buley, however, the writable API will not allow users to submit stories remotely.

After a long weekend, you may find you're all caught up on your favorite shows. If you're looking for a new source for entertainment, Berkeley-based community Redux is finally emerging from closed beta. ReadWriteWeb first covered Redux's Facebook and Twitter integration in early October. Since then the company has increased its member base, created some new tools and most importantly, built on the strength of its video.

Get your mind out of the gutter. This isn't about distributing your crude weekend photography, it's about being able to upload content outside the parameters of basic community categories. While we all know that YouTube is for video, Flickr is for photography and LinkedIn is for career-related content, it's hard to tell where we should be sharing our important but uncategorizable content. Nincha is a stealthy little community that just may infiltrate the community sharing space.