Hitwise: Digg has been sending more traffic to mainstream media web sites lately — Take a look at the graph below, and read what the web research company has to say, here. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks recently published his own report anecdotally noticing the changes; he speculates that Digg may be looking to sell to a mainstream news company.
Intel announces a second-quarter record of $9.5 billion in revenue — More here.
San Francisco government computer system compromised – A rogue IT employee, currently cooling his heels in jail, illegally created his own master password that gave him exclusive access to the city’s new multi-million dollar computer system. He still hasn’t turned over the password, and top administrators haven’t figured it out on their own. Files he currently has access to include city payroll files, official emails — and importantly for him, as he’s getting arraigned today — confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmate bookings (”What? Show me the documentation that I was ever in jail.”). The Chronicle has a closer look at this man-made disaster.
As real species go extinct, millions of virtual ones are springing up on Spore — First, the bad news: Researchers announced today that many more species may face extinction than previously thought, based on newly-revised calculations. Now, the good news: Spore, a forthcoming video game that recently launched a way for users to create their own virtual creatures, announced today that so far, users have made millions of new species. Spore, a game that will let you evolve a single creature into a galaxy-spanning race, is due out this fall.
Blog software Wordpress gets useful upgrade — New features include a way to track changes across blog-post revisions and a way to easily post media to Wordpress from other sites. The company has more details on these new features and others. Or watch the video. 1.
Pheedo launches additional web advertising tracking features for its RSS feed service - The press release is here.
Business networking site LinkedIn launches ads to target particular subsets of its users — The automated service lets anybody create and pay for their own text ads that run within the site. Read the company’s blog post on the ads for more detail.

When I think of addictive games, three at the top of my list have to be Scrabble, Sudoku and Tetris. I can pretty much play all three for hours on end without taking a break. This problem could get a whole lot worse when all three are in my pocket all day long — as they will be now that Electronic Arts (EA) is releasing them for the iPhone and iPod Touch via Apple’s new App Store.



The AP tries to set a new standard, doesn’t follow it — The Associated Press wants bloggers to pay it for quoting excerpts of its stories, and is threatening to sue if they don’t. Of course, that position is kind of hard to take when you yourself don’t abide by such standards, as the AP didn’t when it lifted a quote from TechCrunch on the matter for
An EA bigwig leaves to start his own company — Neil Young, a veteran of the gaming powerhouse Electronic Arts will leave to start an unspecified “new project,”
The Japanese love/hate the iPhone — A recent survey indicated that
Icahn considers his own proxy war for Yahoo — Billionaire investor Carl Icahn began buying massive amounts of Yahoo stock last week — up to 50 million shares — and now is thinking about using that influence. He is considering replacing some of Yahoo’s board members (not quite 
Another Google exec heads to Facebook – Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs will become the vice president of communications and public policy at Facebook, 