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Yahoo announced today that it is buying Associated Content, a user-generated media company with 380,000 contributors and 16 million monthly visitors.

Yahoo, the second largest search engine after Google, said it will complete this acquisition in the third quarter of 2010. Although financial terms were not released by either company, the deal is thought to be worth in the area of $90-100 million.

Today citizen journalism site AllVoices is launching news bureaus in 30 additional countries. They say the bureaus are to be staffed by a hybrid force of professional and citizen journalists.

New countries represented include Iraq, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Egypt, India, the Philippines and Armenia.

Trumba, the shared calendar and events communications software company has added the ability for users to attach "custom objects" to their Web calendars and other websites. These "objects" are in essence tables that unfold graphically, keyed to links, or can stand on their own as pages.

Trumba's customers use the company's software to publish interlinked calendars and provide other modular features to their websites. Clients include media companies like the New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers, academic institutions like Kansas State and Emory Universities, and groups like the City of Seattle and the New Orleans Saints.

Today, YouTube migrated its user videos over to a new design. The design was available before now, and has been in development for months, but today was the day all the videos got their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes on.

In a January post, Julian Frumar, a YouTube user experience designer, commented on YouTube's blog that the old design could appear "cluttered and a little overwhelming." (Julian, by the way, is up for an Understatement of the Year Award.)

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.

Google Street View has made a few headlines at RWW lately - once for getting itself into hot water in Europe and once, notably, for bringing Street View's photo-tour features into retail outlets.

Now, we've learned that Street View will also begin to feature user-submitted photographs. According to a recent Google Lat Long blog post, "We began integrating user photos into Street View last year. User photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives, whether through the eyes of a talented photographer with a knack for capturing architectural detail, or simply taken from locations we couldn't get to... We're making it easier to navigate through these images in a way that should feel similar to how you're used to exploring within Street View."

Until now, all the news on the hyperlocal news site EveryBlock was compiled by the site's editors and algorithms. Today, EveryBlock launched a nifty new feature that allows its users to post stories to the site and notify their neighbors about interesting events in their neighborhoods. The new feature allows users to post anything from news alerts to questions and classified ads on the site. These alerts will also now appear in EveryBlock's newly enhanced iPhone app (iTunes link).

Those of us who manage online communities have learned to crowdsource a big chunk of our work: identifying user contributions that deserve a higher profile - and those that deserve to be dropped in a deep, dark hole.

But there has to be something more nuanced than just thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. And so...