Mr. Siegler. (Photo: LinkedIn)

A year and a half after bailing on the blog life during the Great TechCrunch Conflagration of '11, MG Siegler is wading deeper into the world of venture capital. He announced today that he's heading to Google Ventures as a general partner. He'll join Kevin Rose and Wesley Chan, focused on seed and early-stage investments.

Mr. Siegler said he'd "continue to work closely with CrunchFund" on investments they've already made as well as writing the occasional column for TechCrunch, because apparently that place is actually the Hotel California. But perish the thought of his revealing confidential info from inside the notoriously secretive GOOG:

"Obviously, there will be some knowledge that I become privy to that I won’t be able to share — but that’s not any different than it has been with many of the startups I’ve worked with over the past 19 months. The difference now is that some of that knowledge will be about one of the most successul startups of all time: Google."

He closed on a contemplative noted, informing readers of his Tumblr: "Yes, they’re letting an Apple fanatic into the building — wild, I know. But as I said, I left the reporting path long ago. I’m on a new path now. Don’t worry, I’m bringing my iPhone with me." Whew, what a relief.

Speaking of Mr. Schmidt, goodies from his upcoming book, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business are beginning to trickle out. Today WikiLeaks released the transcript of a five-hour conversation between Mr. Schmidt and Julian Assange, used for the book. It opens with some really riveting stuff. Mr. Schmidt: "Well do you want us to start eating?" Mr. Assange: "Well, we can do both." Guess there's not much time for leisurely meals in the life of a WikiLeaker.

But the real punch line comes when Mr. Schmidt's co-author, Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen, turns up to the discussion late, blaming Delta. It seems Mr. Assange was expecting someone a little different:

"Larry?" he asks. "Jared," Mr. Cohen replies. "Jared! Jared," Mr. Assange attempts to recover. Now that's the GIF we'd really like to see.

You oughta see the other guy Seems whoever's defacing ads these days as some pretty strong feelings about Mark Zuckerberg. Witness the work of some wag with a marker, as captured by AllThingsD's Peter Kafka.

Lost in translation Speaking of the Facebook dynasty, this week Randi Zuckerberg took to her LiveJournal account digital lifestyle site Dot Complicated to blog hard about her super fun and exciting trip to Japan. She learned so many things, you guys! Well, just a dozen, but still. She reported that the country has many non-spoken societal rules like not speaking on the subways and ratted out her baby for breaking the quiet of the train car. ("Honestly, the loudest person on the subway by far was my son, who would announce, “All done!” every time the subway came to a stop.")

Another nugget: The very first question she asks upon entering a new country is, “What apps and websites is everyone using here?" That puts our "Where the hell is the bathroom?" to shame.

Mr. Photogenic Is there anything that Kevin Rose can't do? (Well, except for save Digg.) Earlier this week Mr. Rose used his Facebook to promote his wife's upcoming book, Foodist, declaring himself "stoked" for the release. But we suspect the post was also just a chance to show off his dashing/dorky appearance in the book trailer. He should pivot to being a Pottery Barn catalog model if his coffee-drinking/investing/oversharing gig fails. Potential clients might want to remember what happened the last time he took a cover modeling job, though.

Bonus: A cameo by Toaster, the dog who gave his name to the Instagram filter.

Everyone's a critic Facebook rolled out a cleaner and more streamlined look this week, but not everyone is enamored with it. Newly minted Yahoo! millionaire, design divo and Summly creator Nick D'Alosio tweeted his meh-bivalence about it. "Good to see the directional change to flat design except the colour used is still heavy and muted." That "u" is adorable even when he throws shade!

Promo FOMO Would-be part-owner of the Brooklyn Nets Alexis Ohanian wants to know why Reddit's logo isn't on his season tickets. Hell, given the price tag, he ought to get a monogrammed commemorative edition.

I'm the trash man Jack Dorsey continues his Sisyphean struggle to clean the streets of San Francisco, all by himself if that's what it takes. Here's his latest snap from the Clean Streets initiative, filter-free and everything. A design enthusiast's work is never done.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/325319564349034497

What's wrong with that? (Photo: Wikimedia)

The Chat-rooming Classes Today, seemingly every tech reporter in the business tuned into Jason Calacanis's "This Week in Startups," presumably in the hopes that Mr. Calacanis would tell all re: the allegations of abuse against Michael Arrington. But as familiar names chattered away in the chat room, Mr. Calacanis had little to say beyond comparing himself to Obi Wan. That would make Mr. Arrington Anakin Skywalker, of course; Mr. Calacanis said he taught him how to be powerful in media, and "I regret that."

As for the allegations themselves, Mr. Calacanis was quick to say he wouldn't be commenting on whether they were true, citing his lack of direct knowledge. (He did, however, openly discuss the time that Mr. Arrington called a PR honcho "the c-word," thereby outing someone who'd never mentioned the incident publicly!) [Correction: Mr. Calacanis first mentioned the incident and the PR exec (Brooke Hammerling) by name in the comments of his Facebook post, prompting Ms. Hammerling to confirm the story, also in a Facebook comment.] All in all, it sounds like he (kinda sorta) regrets getting involved. He apparently thought writing a Facebook note wouldn't go very far. "I thought that that would be a place where it just lived there," he said. (Paging Randi Zuckerberg!) "I got a little P.T. Barnum in me and I feel like me commenting on all this stuff actually detracts from it," he added.

The Biggest Failure Silicon Alley fameballer and Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick took to PandoDaily this week to lament his decision to sell his company Connected Ventures, which included CollegeHumor and Vimeo, to media conglomerate IAC in 2006. In the post, called “An acquisition is always a failure,” Mr. Lodwick wrote that selling the company to IAC was “the worst business decision of his life” because although it fattened his bank account, it stifled his ability to work creatively. Getting acquire is like giving up, he argued, which we’re sure delighted his fellow NYC entrepreneurs who are desperately groping for the exit sign.

We suppose you can’t have your cake and eat it too, even if the cake is made of millions of dollars.

Kenny Lerer's Got Ringtones In the midst of a recent phone call with Ken Lerer about Lure Fish Bar, his favorite power lunch spot, our conversation was interrupted by the dulcet sounds of Jim Morrison from his cellphone. Was that “People Are Strange,” we asked? Yes, Mr. Lerer confirmed, revealing that he spends “way too much time” picking out the right ringtones for the important people in his life. That Doors song was for Brian Bedol, Mr. Lerer’s business partner in the media and entertainment company Bedrocket. "If you knew Brian," he said, "'People Are Strange' is the perfect ring tone for him."

Did he have a ringtone for his son Ben, the cofounder of Thrillist? “Oh this is embarrassing,” he replied, admitting that it was Rod Stewart’s “Some Guys Get All the Luck.” “Not bad, huh?” quipped Mr. Lerer the elder.

Brit’s Got Jokes On Monday, Brit + Co. founder Brit Morin announced on her Facebook page that she was expecting a baby with her husband, Path cofounder Dave Morin. Of course, the update was quickly debunked as an April Fool’s Day prank, despite the fact that she posted it towards the end of the day. “For all of you who wished me congratulations on being pregnant, thank you for being a total sucker!” she wrote.

Apparently, along with making Christmas trees out of cheese and turning Mac extension cords into jump ropes, such personal pranks are part of Ms. Morin’s repertoire.

“The trick is to wait until the evening of April Fools when people think all the jokes are over,” she wrote. “I pull this one every single year and still, so many fall for it ;)” Guess she lost all of next year’s suckers by giving away her secret.

PR darling Brooke Hammerling had a subtweet for the ladies pretending to be with child for April Fool’s Day:

https://twitter.com/brooke/status/319229167046623233

Jack Did it All for the Nookie We knew about Jack Dorsey's nose ring, but we had no idea he used to be in Limp Bizkit. Business Insider uncovered an old photo of the Square cofounder that shows him looking quite different than he does when sporting his current hand-sewn jeans look. The black and white portrait has Mr. Dorsey with full-on 90s rave kid hair. Pass the glowstick, bro.

(Photo: Twitter)

Bloggers! They're Just Like Us! Business Insider editor Steve Kovach gets hearts aflutter, apparently. As overheard by fellow editor (so many over there!) Alyson Shontell, a starry eyed PR person compared their meeting with Mr. Kovach to that of a Hollywood star. It's understandable, we constantly confuse Mr. Kovach with Jake Gyllenhaal every time we see him out with the normals.

http://twitter.com/shontelaylay/status/319838156486758400

Do You Startup, Bro? Silicon Valley's fraternity president and Digg founder Kevin Rose was the subject of an ABC News profile this week which reminded us he's still around! The Google Ventures partner revealed what new apps he's circling to potentially fund, including a personal training app called FitStar. He also revealed that the Instagram filter Toaster is named after his adorable dog and detailed what his typical day is like: "Invest in start-ups. Find the next big thing. Meet with entrepreneurs. Drink coffee. Hang out." Sounds like a Bravo show in the making.

Internet Weak On Thursday, the New York collective of the Web’s  hive mind met up for a low key gathering at the Watch What Happens Live prop closet Design Within Reach showroom in SoHo to celebrate the quickly approaching Internet Week. The festival's new director Caroline Waxler welcomed the sharply dressed but older-skewing crowd. iPads were shuffled around to get attendees to sign up and vote  for the 200+ panels that are in contention for just 13 slots to be showcased at the yearly event. (Holding a drink from the open bar and registering on the iPad was difficult, but we managed.)

Anyway, the annoyingly arranged support columns, a seating arrangement dependent on the furniture layout, and the tri-level setup made it hard to pay attention to Vice editors Kelly Bourdet and Brian A. Anderson. After talking for a half hour about all the cool things Vice does (and plentiful mentions of the burgeoning media empire's massive presence at SXSW), they showed off a drone for people to play with. But that wasn’t enough to amuse the partygoers as throngs of them slinked off shortly after the panel ended. Perhaps that was enough Internet for one day.

Mr. McClure

#RealTalk Dave McClure, our favorite giver of zero fucks, went on a bit of a Twitter tear the other day. It started with the admission that he'd "just had really hard tough love talk w/ startup founder. fucking sucks, but better harsh truth than bullshit 'you'll make it work' lies." He didn't stop there, adding that "what really sucks is none of other investors (incl big lead VC) have the balls 2 tell them its not going 2 fucking work & shut it down."

He concluded: "the Silicon Valley story is indeed the 1% story of Instagram $1B win, but also 99% broken dreams, shattered hopes & try, try again. sigh."

Okay, 'fess up: Who's the startup? Tips@betabeat.com if you wanna talk.

Not So Super Today, in unlikely historical connections: Wired reports that the decades-long legal battle over the ownership of Superman has been resolved... using the precedent set by the conclusion of Winklevoss vs. Facebook. To simplify a byzantine copyright nightmare: In 1938, the creators of Superman sold the rights for a mere $130. For decades, Jerry Siegel’s heirs have been attempting to rectify the move. In the latest chapter of the saga, they argued that an agreement reached in 2001 wasn’t finalized, meaning that the Siegel heirs could press for more rights and more money. Lots and lots of money. It also presented a potential legal problem for the studio with Man of Steel, which is scheduled to hit screens this summer.

In 2008, the courts sided with the Siegels. That’s been overturned, though, thanks in part to a ruling against the Winklevosses claim that an earlier settlement with Facebook hadn’t actually been binding. Warner Bros. now has the rights to make the movies free and clear--and without having to hand over more moola to Siegel's heirs. Hope the Winklevii and Mark Zuckerberg are proud of themselves for this.

It Ain’t Me, Babe Last year’s coverage of the booth babes of CES took a more circumspect, critical view. “That Mad Men bullshit doesn't represent who we are as an industry anymore, and it certainly doesn't represent what we should aspire to become. Technology is about the future, and this attitude is from the past,” Mat Honan wrote over at Gizmodo.

But Business Insider went back to business as usual this week with its slideshow ogling the antiquated, alienating marketing tactic.

glad we've moved past meta booth babe coverage and circled back to unironic booth babe galleries

— matt buchanan (@mattbuchanan) January 10, 2013

That wasn’t the only sexism on display. Skillcrush, the tech literacy startup, took a stab at “unpacking male tech privilege,” starting with the backlash that followed a petition to get more women on conference panels.

Indeed, blockbuster tech shows tend to surface all manner of moral quandaries, apparently, such as what happened when CNET's corporate owners intercede in news coverage to their own advantage. It was enough make Sam Biddle go straight quid pro quo.

(GIF HAT TIP: @jwherrman)

Viva Las Vegas Maybe the Buzzfeed editorial team skipped CES, but that doesn't mean head honcho Jonah Peretti missed a chance to visit Sin City. Photographic evidence comes from the unlikeliest of sources: Namely News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted that "At CES getting many brilliant presentations. So far most fun Buzzfeed."

We'd almost be afraid to hear what secrets were discussed. Our faces might melt off, like in Raiders of the Last Ark.

WTF Consider the charmed life of Kevin Rose. Sure, Digg crashed and burned (only to be resurrected by Betaworks once it was out of his hands), but Mr. Rose landed on his feet. He's now a venture partner at Google who spends his time Instagramming things like his Hawaii vacation and also this:

The caption: "Hanging with Tim Ferriss, yes this is normal."

Here's what we'd like to know: What was Mr. Rose wearing to the party? Was this, by chance, a furry party?

Open the door and influenza Could someone check on Chris Hughes? You might find him huddled in a corner at the New Republic between two bookshelves overflowing with pamphlets from the 1950s, clutching a giant bottle of hand sanitizer. Earlier this week he tweeted a link to a New York Times piece (with an xpost to Facebook) and commented that "Flu, stomach viruses, and whooping cough are at record levels this season. Reminder: wash hands compulsively."

Okay actually now we're terrified too. If you need us, we'll be looking for Mr. Hughes' Tamiflu stockpile.

Map-maker, Map-maker, Build Me a Map! If Tim Cook's mea culpa wasn't enough to demonstrate how hard Apple is scrambling to fix its iOS 6 mapocalypse, then how about its last ditch recruiting techniques to find Ruby developers? Mojo Talantikite, a cluster engineer at Engine Yard in New York City, said he (and a number of his technically talented friends) have been hit up by Apple recruiters recently.

The recruiter's LinkedIn inquiry mentions "Maps" specifically:

"We are looking for a passionate Ruby coder to have a HUGE impact our Maps, Flyover, Geo and Siri teams in iOS. I've read about your work on Heroku's infrastructure. Is it a good time for you to chat?"

My, What Colorful Balls You Have Startup perks tend to veer toward the infantile. Between the snacks, slides, and nap pods, managers might as well try to wipe your nose when you sneeze. But newly-married Elepath founder Jakob Lodwick actually committed, procuring the ball pool of your childhood dreams for Elepath's San Francisco "studio." At least that's what we thought based on his recent Instagram offering. However, on closer inspection, an antimated gif from Elepath's blog reveals the ball pool is less Chuck E. Cheese and more kiddie pool. Things on the Internet, it seems, may be smaller than they appear.

Cussing For a Cause Last week Tech4Obama hosted an evening in New York with serial entrepreneur and current CTO for Obama for America Harper Reed. Next to the guest list--heavily studded with Silicon Alley stalwarts like Soraya Darabi, Rachel Sklar, and Betaworks' Andrew McLaughlin and investor Pedro Torres Picon--the invitation loudly warned "THIS EVENT IS CLOSED TO PRESS." Now we know why. Apparently the bearded Mr. Reed has quite the mouth on him. But doesn't he know reporters love that shit?

Colorblind We're still not really sure what Color was launched to do, but it got $40 million in funding to do it. The app subsequently became the archetypal overfunded startup representing tech's hype bubble (even inspiring a fake pitch deck!). Color treaded in the wave pool for a bit before pivoting to a new idea altogether.

Now, TechCrunch reports that Color may be experiencing an executive level shakeup, with sources saying CEO Bill Nguyen will be taking a step back from from day-to-day operations at the flailing company. In his stead, an "executive committee" has been assembled to take over his responsibilities.

Mr. Nguyen apparently hasn't shown up to the office in two months, leading sources to conjecture that he's "probably either in Tahoe or Hawaii.” (Ugh.) An ominous Quora post from January of this year wondered why Color had shuttered its Palo Alto office, but CNET journalist Casey Newton responded that the company said they'd "hung some paper up to cover its windows while they do some work inside." Hmm, engineers do have some weird working habits.

Of course, a question about why Mr. Nguyen left Color immediately cropped up on Quora and was quickly answered with a cringe-worthy response. "After the disastrous pivot from the initial (fairly brilliant, but poorly implemented) photo sharing concept, it was really only a matter of 'Nguyen, not if'."

Sigh.

Digging K-Pop Looks like Digg cofounder Kevin Rose is officially a fan of the "Gangnam Style" hype. Mr. Rose posted a photo on his Instagram of a little bobble head Psy doing the infamous horse dance, sharing a photo of his Psy laptop decal shortly after. Try to ignore the awkward comment about "open condom style," below.

(Photo: Instagram)

Business Tattler Henry Blodget proudly outed Verge's editor-in-chief today, tweeting, "Josh Topolsky reads Business Insider!" But the real question is: does he hate read it?

As always: Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com

Mr. Kutcher at TechCrunch Disrupt. (flickr.com/kevinkrejci)

That's according to some number crunching from PeekYou, anyway. The company has debuted a new analytics service and, to promote the product, took the time to rank Twitter's top 1,000 most influential tech investors. CEO Michael Hussey explained the methodology to VentureBeat: 

Unlike Klout’s engagement rankings, PeekAnalytics’ rankings derive from “the quality of your audience,” Hussey said. If you multiply the amount of followers someone has by the amount of people in the followers’ networks, you get a “pull quotient,” by which you can rank audience quality.

Hm, okay.

A few more, well, interesting findings:

• Al Gore (Generation Investment) sits comfortably within the top ten, at number 8. Please, no jokes about the invention of the Internet.
• At number 16, Tim Ferriss (who, when not touting his fitness strategies, makes angel investments in companies like Twitter and Posterous) outranks hometown hero Fred Wilson, who comes in at 18.
• Kevin Rose, in his new home at Google Ventures, outranks both of them at 10.
• Anil Dash (no. 23) beats Michael Arrington (no. 27).
• There are only two women--newly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior--in the top thirty. (Pause for sad trombone sound effect.)
• It does not appear that any of PeekYou's investors made the top thirty.

We propose a slightly different, more meatspace metric: How many people, on average, surround each investor at any given party? That's where, as the kids say, shit gets real.

The infamous pic. (Photo: Businessweek)

Last night, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced that he was doing an AMA on Reddit. Following the announcement, he immediately vacated the site and did not return to it for 24 hours. As many of the interested Redditors are refugees from Digg, they did not take kindly to this crucial misunderstanding of how exactly Reddit works. Generally, you don't announce you're doing an AMA unless you intend to answer questions at that very moment.

"Kevin just tweeted an Instagram picture at Alcatraz," wrote one user. "Pretty sure he forgot about this."

"Maybe it is symbolic of being trapped in an AMA he regrets," retorted another.

Some time this afternoon, Mr. Rose returned to the thread in order to answer the (mostly indignant) questions that had collected while he was away. Perhaps to make up for his tardiness, he even took the time to record a few video replies to Redditors' questions.

Our favorite response had to be when he opened up about that embarrassingly overused Businessweek cover depicting a baby-faced Mr. Rose making an overenthusiastic "thumbs up" gesture while donning a backwards hat and giant earphones.

Mr. Rose had once explained the photo to Valleywag, but not in such detail. According to him, he was jokingly making the "thumbs up" gesture at the Digg creative director when the photog snapped the picture. The hat and headphones were due to Businessweek insisting he bring props that made him look like a young and fresh entrepreneur.

According to Mr Rose:

"Who would ever want that photo to be on the cover of any magazine? [The photographer] promised me he wouldn't use it....they don't give you any say in that stuff and it showed up on the cover of Businessweek. You take a look at something like that and say, 'God I really wish they would have chose a different photo.' And another part of me is like, 'You know what, I don't care if I was topless on the cover of Businessweek, because it's just an honor to be on that magazine.' It was kind of bittersweet."

Ah, to have the problems of the rich and tech famous.

Mr. Rose (Photo: flickr.com/joi)

In the winter of 2004, soon after the husks of once-great dot-com startups had dried and shriveled, a 27-year-old college dropout named Kevin Rose deployed a barebones new site, simply named “Digg.”

It was one of the first social networks in existence. Back then, the term “social networking” hadn’t shouldered its way into our lexicon yet. Facebook was a nascent, walled platform for college gossip; Google was still idly toying with its search algorithm; Twitter wouldn’t launch for another two years.

News itself was a hierarchical affair, largely produced and disseminated by trusted broadcasters and editors. Journalism’s democratizing forces hadn’t congealed, yet; bloggers weren’t sitting front row at fashion shows or making a living off of Google Ads. The idea that a community of Internet geeks could manipulate the news cycle would’ve elicited howls of mocking laughter from the Conde kingmakers.

Mr. Rose, then an occasional tech TV talking head, launched Digg with the notion that it would change all that. Digg wants “to give the power back to the people,” proclaimed Mr. Rose in a 2005 preview of the website on the tech TV show The Screen Savers. By “digging” or “burying” links, users could effectively weed out the detritus and let the news they liked best filter its way to the top. The site’s functionality gave users the power to decide what deserved to be seen, and they were rewarded by spotting links early that would eventually become popular. Diggers garnered further clout by interacting with each other. Real power users began to emerge, enabled by their nimble maneuverings on the platform.

These days, stodgy publications like The New York Times pen fawning profiles of BuzzFeed bloggers and Business Insider newshounds, seemingly entranced by their mystical ability to foresee what will go viral. But Digg’s power users are the predecessors of keen-eyed bloggers, and Digg gave them the platform to broadcast their Internet soothsaying abilities. “The service forced me to get very good at finding news and interesting stories — and doing it fast,” wrote one-time Digg power user, former tech reporter and current venture capitalist M.G. Siegler in a recent blog post. “It also forced me to hone my headline writing skills.... Without Digg, I almost certainly would not be where I am now.”

“It was the first iteration of social news and social sharing,” Aubrey Sabala, an early employee of Digg, told Betabeat by phone. “In a lot of ways it was ahead of its time.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Internet revolution: following a handful of hefty capital rounds, mounting investor pressure put the focus on monetization. And some of Digg’s power users turned to the dark side, allowing advertisers and publishers to pay them for “diggs” so that their content could make it to the front page. In 2009, Digg rolled out a clunky ad experience, much to the chagrin of its fan base, which began to jump ship for Facebook and Twitter. A buggy overhaul of the site released in 2010 was the final straw: Digg crested the hill on its final decline, the majority of the site’s devoted users eventually decamping for Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

But now Digg, the sleeping--or is it dead?--community giant, is getting the chance to redeem and recreate itself in the moneyed bosom of the New York tech scene, thanks to an acquisition by startup incubator Betaworks. Betaworks, nestled in the Meatpacking district steps away from the Highline, purchased Digg’s core assets just a handful of weeks ago, and set out to recreate the Digg experience from the ground up. What’s left of the Digg brand will be revived by the News.me team, another Betaworks social news startup that has been tapped to resurrect Digg’s decrepit corpse. And they've done it in just six weeks.

It’s an opportunity few startups ever get: to atone for their sins and start from scratch in a safety bubble, protected from the pressures of monetization and investor interests. They can build a purer product this time, learn from the lessons of Digg’s former incarnation, and hone in on accurately catering to the way users consume news.

But with its one-time competitor Reddit miles ahead in the race for relevancy, is it too late?

***

Mr. Borthwick with Mr. Siegler (Photo: flickr.com/techcrunch)

Less than 24 hours before the launch of the new version of Digg, Betabeat arrived at the Betaworks office, an airy, sprawling labyrinth of Apple products and side-by-side desks occupied by work crazed young people. We’d arrived just in time for a chocolate covered banana cart to show up, heralding a quaint office gathering celebrating the new Digg. Jake Levine, the former manager of News.me who became manager of Digg following the acquisition, told us that before the acquisition went through, he talked about Digg in codewords to his teammates. “We called it the banana stand,” he said, referring to a beloved Arrested Development plotline.

“Digg is one of the great iconic web 2.0 brands,” said Betaworks CEO John Borthwick in a clipped British accent, after we’d settled into a corner conference room littered with Betaworks stickers. (Sadly, there would be no frozen bananas for this Betabeat reporter.) Through the glass doors, we could see a red pole strung up with a Guy Fawkes mask, the universal symbol for the hacker group Anonymous. “It helped define a whole new wave of company creation and innovation," Mr. Borthwick went on. "But also this idea of socially curated news is something that they helped create.”

It was a pure idea, but the infusion of capital, coupled with the inherent drawbacks of the Digg voting model, ultimately led to Digg’s demise. “The company raised a lot of money maybe a little bit too fast and couldn’t figure out how to make money and then sort of went through a painful process of growing downwards,” Mr. Borthwick admitted. “Sometimes companies get pumped up like athletes full of steroids, so much so that they’re really strong and fit but they can’t actually walk any longer so they kind of fall over on their own weight.”

In short: mo’ money, mo’ problems.

Mr. Levine (Photo: Twitter)

Digg’s rebirth will also happen in a very different media environment. “It’s 2012, it’s not 2004,” emphasized Mr. Borthwick. “So what Digg needs is to change a little bit.” By scrapping the old code and rebuilding the infrastructure, Mr. Borthwick said that the new Digg will operate at 1/15th of the cost that the old Digg was running at just last month.

Additionally, now media companies that previously mocked the power of online communities are clamoring to plaster their links all over social news sites. Conde Nast snapped Reddit up back in 2006, hoping to expand its web properties, but its DNA never really fit the Conde mold, due to the site’s unwavering dedication to its community and refusal to cater to publishers. Social news communities like Reddit have grown from a barnacle on the side of the Internet to one of its primary content generators. Traffic-hungry blogs like BuzzFeed source a substantial amount of their content right from the trenches of Reddit. And with 2.5 billion pageviews a month, the amount of traffic Reddit can drive to a site in a single day could trounce pageview targets for an entire quarter. (Previously: Loving the Alien: How Erik Martin, King Bee of Reddit's Hivemind, Harnessed the Buzz)

For its part, Digg may have spread itself too thin, attempting to simultaneously placate disparate groups with competing interests. “I feel like when they moved to version 4, they were trying to serve too many constituencies: publishers, the users and the advertisers,” Erik Martin, Reddit’s general manager, told Betabeat by phone. That 4th version, which launched in 2010 and introduced publishers to the site, was so buggy that it crippled Digg’s functionality for weeks. "Many people will tell you that v4 of Digg was the tipping point, and I agree, for a simple reason," Miguel Lopez, a former Digg power user, told Betabeat by email. "It alienated the hardcore users and the community that had formed around the site.... They drove their most loyal users away, and for any 'social' site that is plain suicide."

“The front page went from interesting, to a bunch of corporate sponsored ads and a few threads that managed to squeak through,” wrote one Reddit user in a recent post about what killed Digg. “I didn’t come to Reddit because it was better or because it replaced digg for me, I came here because digg had a sudden heart attack and died.”

So how did Reddit avoid the same tragic fate as Digg? Its algorithms don’t allow users to collaborate and game the system, for one. “The frontpage we designed was a constantly rising and falling list of links (not like how digg and all of its clones just had a chronological format where once something got enough diggs it became #1 on the frontpage--an easily exploitable way to get a ton of traffic),” said Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian in an email. “It's not perfect, as we're always fighting cheaters, but we've also had to explain to an unsettling number of publishers that reddit, unlike its past competition, is not designed to be ‘gamed.’ We've had to reprimand quite a bit of bad behavior that used to be the status quo.”

In a way, Reddit is immune from many of the pressures that Silicon Alley startups are forced to contend with. Being scooped up by Conde did have its privileges. Unlike Digg, Reddit didn’t have to rely solely on ad revenue to sustain itself. Had Digg curbed its hubris and accepted Google’s offer of $200 million for an acquisition in 2008, it may not have had to roll out so many of the premium features--like “Diggable ads”--that drove users away. “We’ve been lucky in a sense with the Conde Nast situation,” admitted Mr. Martin. “It did protect us from having to quickly monetize.”

The new Digg, which will be tweaked with scientific precision at the lab-like Betaworks, won’t have any ads at all--at least not in version one. It will also be free of the clutter that has bloated Digg for years: with no Digg navigation bar and no “Newsroom” feature, it will be image-friendly, lightweight and easy to use on your cell phone. The interface looks a lot like a typical news blog, with a large image and headline dominating the top half of the screen, while other stories collect in neat boxes beneath it.

In a nod to the dominant forces of social media, the number of “Diggs” on a story will also account for the times it’s been shared on Facebook and Twitter, in order to provide a more holistic portrait of what’s popular across the web. This move also has the added benefit of making it much harder for power users to game the system. For version 1, users will have to login using Facebook Connect in order to "Digg" a story, a temporary move that already has some legacy users riled up.

“There’s a lot of attention and pressure and visibility for tomorrow,” Mr. Levine told us of the version 1 launch. “But what we care about is not launch day, it’s the 14 days or 28 days after launch and the iterations that follow.”

“We could have spent six months on it or a year, but we realized that if this was going to be a good product then we needed to get it out the door as quickly as possible,” he added. “The six week time frame forced really hard decisions, to focus on what is the single thing that Digg does well and that users expect from Digg, and how we could do that well.”

***

A few weeks prior to the launch of the new Digg, the Betaworks team published a survey to their blog soliciting user feedback. The consensus was unanimous: 92 percent of those surveyed would not recommend the old version of Digg to a friend. Users wanted the simpler Digg back, the one that surfaced interesting content and enabled a community of diverse individuals to post and respond to stories they cared about.

“I spent a weekend reading through all of the responses, and time and time again they said, ‘I came to Digg to find great stories. I came to Digg to find stories I couldn’t find elsewhere, the weird and the funny and the geeky,’” said Mr. Levine. That’s where the new Digg will start. From the belly of Betaworks, it will eschew revenue models and investor interests and focus on remaking Digg into the kind of site Internet users used to love.

Digg once went in search of monetization, but now the new team behind it wants what the platform was offering all along: a snapshot of the hivemind, a place capable of measuring the Internet’s pulse. Now, the new Digg team has the same advantage that Reddit obtained when it sold to Conde.

“Part of what we want to do is stay as small as possible for as long as possible,” said Mr. Levine. “So that we can continue to be beholden to just our users, and not incentives for monetization.”

On the back of his iPhone case, a black and white “Fuck it Ship it” sticker caught the lamplight just right.

(Photo: Network World)

Microsoft Outlook now operates in-browser and is apparently a legitimate Gmail competitor? No flipping desks for Steve Ballmer today. [Wired]

Things are not looking good in iPad mag land. The Daily has laid off a 1/3rd of its staff. [AllThingsD]

Kevin Rose did an AMA, just in time for the release of the new Digg. It got less than 1,000 upvotes and apparently he didn't actually answer any questions. [Reddit]

Two online poker sites are paying millions in damages following fraud and money laundering charges. Guess the government called their bluff. [New York Times]

Times Square will broadcast the Mars landing on one of those gigantic screens. The space geek in us is currently fighting with the person in us who fucking hates Times Square. [NASA]

UBS lost $356 million in the Facebook IPO. Yikes. [The New York Times]

(Original photo: App Advice)

Deconstructing the myth of the "booth babe." [Jezebel]

Speaking of myths, the Facebook phone is apparently a reality, which is a shame because nobody wants a stupid Facebook phone. [Bloomberg]

Roku continues getting cozy with pay TV, raises $45 million from News Corps. and BSkyB. [TechCrunch]

Kevin Rose on the new Betaworks incarnation of Digg: "It’s very simple, and there’s a lot of emphasis on real-time." Version one of the new Digg is set to debut in one week. [GigaOm]

Google is livestreaming its announcement about rolling out a fiber network in Kansas City today. [Google]

Zynga shares tumbled 42 percent yesterday; not even gullible mothers taking care of virtual crops can fix that. [Bloomberg]