VentureBeat

With over 30 million monthly unique users, Digg is a juggernaut of a site. Despite perpetual rumors of an imminent acquisition by major players like Google or Microsoft, the social voting site is now gearing up for a major expansion on its own. And it’s just secured a big round of funding to make that expansion possible.

Interestingly, almost half of Digg’s users are outside of the U.S. now, the service claims on its blog. So one of the big pushes for an expansion of the site into 2009 will be an emphasis on local — both in tastes and languages, something that I’ve noted in the past would likely be a good idea. Mixx, a Digg competitor, had placed an emphasis on local news early on, but that site still has nowhere near the traction of Digg.

When asked about what specific areas of the world the company may target first with its expansion plans, Digg would only say that it hasn’t announce a roll-out plan yet.

Other efforts in Digg’s expansion include improving its recently launched recommendation system — which a couple months in seems to be working pretty well. This will coincide with more efforts to make it easier to discover and organize the huge amount of data that Digg amasses on any given day.

Expanding community outreach programs and working on new tools for publishers are two other areas Digg says it will focus on.

Naturally, to handle all of this new work, the company is also hiring. It will also be moving into a larger office in the San Francisco, Calif. area next year.

Digg’s new $28.7 million round was led by Highland Capital Partners. Existing backers Greylock Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and the Omidyar Network also participated, according to The New York Times’ Bits blog. Digg has raised a total of $40 million now in three rounds.

While Digg declined to comment on where this latest round puts its valuation, one thing is for certain: If a big player is still looking to buy Digg, the price just went up. Digg seems content to go it alone for the foreseeable future.

[photo: flickr/ericskiff]

News aggregator site Digg plans to introduce “sub-Diggs” that let small groups of users create their own news aggregators, similar to what smaller rivals Reddit and Mixx already offer, according to The Windy Citizen. It’s not clear if this means sub-sites within Digg.com or if users will be able to use Digg’s software to create completely separate sites — Reddit has notably open-sourced its software code to enable the latter.

Also, this is especially interesting because Digg just announced that it will integrate Facebook Connect into its site. This way, Facebook users can sign on to Digg with a single click, then display their Digg actions (like “digging” a story) within their Facebook’s news feed. One can imagine groups of Facebook friends easily creating their own mini aggregators to so they can collectively filter the news they care about most.

San Francisco-based Digg says it will roll the sub feature out within the next half year.

The news was announced at a Digg meetup yesterday in Chicago. There, the Chicago Tribune newspaper also announced a widget that will display its top stories on Digg within its own site — a way to encourage its reader to vote its stories up. The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and other top publications already offer various ways of integrating Digg with their content.

Also at the meetup, Digg chief executive Jay Adelson (wearing a blue shirt in the meetup photo, above), responded to recurring rumors about the company getting purchased by Google. “There is no word,” he said. “We commented on one of these rumors before and it got us in trouble. There is nothing to say.”

[Photo via absalonprieto]

It’s been a long time coming, but Digg is finally rolling out its “Recommendation Engine” to registered users this week. The basic idea is that the service will look at what stories you have dugg (the term for when you give an ‘up’ vote to an item) and based upon that, find similar users to you, using them to send you new stories.

Flat out: This is the feature that can make Digg useful to me again.

The premise and promise of Digg has always been great: Utilize the “wisdom of the crowds” to find the best and most interesting news. Certainly this will bring about different items than any one editor or even a group of editors for a publication or website could. The problem in the past several months is that Digg has gotten too big for its own good.

With over 16,000 stories now submitted to Digg each day (interestingly in the video embedded below, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose contradicts his post and says that 12,000-14,000 are submitted), there is too much stuff to filter through by yourself. To find meaningful stories you will either have to spend a lot of time digging through the upcoming section manually — or do what most everyone else does: Simply go to Digg’s front page.

If most people are only going to Digg’s front page and not seeking out new stories, that’s a problem. It means that still only a relatively small percentage are responsible for determining what eventually hits Digg’s main page. As a result, Digg front page has seemed somewhat stale and also redundant over the past several months.

By passively using other Digg users as filters for interesting news, we should see a lot more interesting content being dugg. If it works as planned, that system will perpetuate itself and Digg will be better for it. In theory, the more items you digg, the better the system will get at recommending new items to you.

This rollout comes at the right time for Digg as well. Competitors such as Mixx and Propeller (formerly Netscape) continue to grow (though they are both still much smaller than Digg). Meanwhile, arguably Digg’s biggest competitor, Reddit, recently open-sourced its code. This will not only allow developers to use all of their code as they see fit, it will also allow them to help improve Reddit.

Could we be about to see a resurgence of fresh, interesting content on Digg with this Recommendation Engine? This change is by far the most promising news in months. I’d digg it.

Watch the video below for more.

Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Here’s the latest action:

New partnership brings Helio to Virgin Mobile — Virgin Mobile USA will acquire the U.S. arm of South korea-based SK Telecom, namely, a mobile operator called Helio, according to the Financial Times. Both mobile operators have been struggling to make money by piggybacking on the infrastructure of existing carriers. This announcement doesn’t offer any sense of how they might bounce back; it just seems loaded with more bad news, like the estimate that Virgin Mobile USA will lose up to 160,000 users in the second quarter of this year.

Starbucks will stop selling CDs — Starbucks is abandoning its plan to become an entertainment hub where customers can pick up a CD or iTunes gift card along with their lattes, reports Silicon Alley Insider. All in-store music offerings should be gone by September. Starbucks customers may not notice, since they weren’t buying many of those CDs anyway, but this is more bad news for the struggling music industry, which once saw Starbucks as an opportunity for growth.

Digg competitor Mixx adds community-building features – Mixx, another site that allows users to vote on media content, is launching a new feature called Mixx Communities. Users can now set up their own Mixx sites, allowing them to build a Mixx community around specific topics. Another competitor called Reddit already enabled user-created pages, and even went a step further last week by going open source.

Intel doesn’t want Vista either — Intel has decided that it won’t upgrade the computers of its 80,000 employees to the latest and arguably least popular version of the Microsoft operating system, according to The New York Times’ anonymous source. That looks pretty bad for Microsoft, since the software company and chip maker have had a famously close relationship; some observers dubbed the pair “Wintel.” On the other hand, it’s not that surprising, because it’s pretty darn hard to find anyone who wants Vista on their computer. (Aside from VentureBeat writer MG Siegler, that is.)

Social network Multiply lets you backup your videos and photos — With an application built on the Adobe AIR platform, Multiply users can automatically backup all the media in selected folders on their computers. The site charges $20 per year for unlimited storage. In some ways, the move makes sense, since there’s so much media hosted by social networks like Multiply anyway.

Craigslist to overtake eBay in 2009? — The online marketplace market (what a mouthful) is going to have a new leader within a year, predicts entrepreneur and blogger Andrew Chen. Spurred by a comment at the GigaOM’s just-finished Structure conference, he looked at traffic numbers from Compete and Quantcast. As eBay traffic falls and Craigslist traffic rises, the latter will overtake the former in 2009, Chen says.

Vint Cerf: Video downloads will be more popular than streaming — The current model of video sites like YouTube won’t last, says Google’s Vint Cerf, the computer scientist frequently described as “the father of the Internet.” In a (streaming) video at Beet.TV, Cerf argues that as web video’s popularity increases and its technology improves, most users will start downloading videos to their computer, rather than streaming them off a site.

MySpace nearing deals with music labels — Before long, MySpace may be offering streaming music and ad-supported downloads from Sony BMG and Warner Music Group, according to a report from the NY Post. A deal with the two music giants might challenge the dominance of Imeem, which has so far held the advantage in its deals with the four music majors.

Tudou.com raises another $53M, maybe — The Chinese video portal Tudou.com may have picked up $53 million, raising its lifetime total to $81 million, according to news site SinoCast. That wasn’t quite enough for peHUB, which made some calls and was “peppered” with “no comments” from previous investors. Primack suggests that the company may be nervous about an upcoming government penalty, but is likely just tardy in announcing the funding.

Mixx makes top users even more powerful — While the social news site Digg has moved to limit the power of its top users, newer, smaller competitor Mixx seems to have the opposite idea. The site, which calls its top users “Super Mixxers”, has given them the ability to tag news stories as “Breaking”, effectively forcing those stories to display on the front page. Giving the most devoted users more powers essentially makes them the editors of the site, a risky move that other sites have so far avoided.

Xerox begins offering carbon calculator for business — What kind of environmental footprint does the paper use of your office cause? What about using the printer? Xerox has unveiled a new “Sustainability Calculator” to let you know. Of course, nothing is free in life, and becoming sustainable might involve buying some of Xerox’s newest products or availing yourself of their “document outsourcing” service. In the long run, though, getting rid of that old ice-cream cart-sized printer might both help the environment and save money. Get an earful on why from some Xerox spokespeople, here.

Founder’s Co-op starts seeding Seattle-area companies — The co-founders of ill-fated local site Judy’s Book have learned from their lesson, and decided not to start a new company. Instead, the two have opened the Founder’s Co-op, a $2 million fund for seed-stage companies in the Seattle area. Investments will range from $10,000 to $250,000, no doubt served with a side of hard-earned wisdom. Read more at the Seattle PI.

Celebrities are the sign of the beast bubble — Taking a trip down memory lane, GigaOm recalls massive fundings of sites started by actors, musicians and sports stars in the dotcom era — then compares them with recent investments into IBeatYou (coverage here), which has received investment from sports stars, and Skispace, owned by a ski champion. “There might be more such celebrity social-something-video-whatever efforts lurking … when you read about them, well, you know the end is near,” says Om. Then again, we survived the launch three weeks ago of MC Hammer’s DanceJam, so maybe the internet is more resilient this time around.

Viewdle takes first investment from Dubai fund — Viewdle, a company that’s working on a video search technology based on facial recognition, has raised an undisclosed first funding from Dubai-based investment group KIT Capital, according to VentureWire (subscription required). We covered Viewdle during its TechCrunch40 launch.

Many startups have tried to take on social news site Digg. Mixx is one of them, but it has a few additional features that lets users fine-tune what stories they see on the site — and it’s made some deals with big newspapers. The company has shown enough progress since launching in October that it has brought back existing investor Intersouth Partners for a $2 million round.

Similar to Digg and competitors, Mixx lets you submit stories, vote on your favorite submissions, add your own comments, and see the most popular stories on the site’s front page. It also shows you news stories, photos, videos and other submitted content based on where you live and what your self-defined interests are.

Mixx also has other differences, like its focus on user participation. Digg has an algorithm that it uses to rank the effect of a user’s vote, but reveals only limited information about the algorithm and also makes changes to it on the fly — making many top Digg users scratch their heads (our coverage). In contrast, Mixx employees themselves blog regularly and openly explain how users can accumulate points for doing things like submitting popular stories and leaving quality comments — and even gain access to special powers (example).

For a different approach to customization, take a look at Reddit. Possibly the most successful Digg competitor, this Conde Naste-owned company also offers a white-label social news services that is gaining some traction among users. For example, there’s one version of Reddit called l33t — or “elite tech news” — that features the submissions, votes and comments of a core group of bloggers and their friends.

Every social news startup seems to be looking towards print publications. Digg itself has a deal with the Wall Street Journal.

Mixx, a product of a McLean, Va. company called Recommended Reading, has been favored by newspapers looking to boost their web sites with a custom social news site focused on their articles. It raised a small amount of funding from one client, the LA Times, last fall (our coverage). It also has deals with USA Today, Reuters.com, The Weather Channel, and others.

The company previously raised $1.5 million round of funding, in a round led by Intersouth Partners.

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The Los Angeles Times has partnered with Mixx, a social news website, to give readers more input in the news they read.

The publication has also said it will start using technology from Aggregrate Knowledge, a Silicon Valley company, to deliver user-driven content suggestions to its web site, starting with its travel section. It lets users see what other users like them have also viewed.

These are the latest moves by a large newspaper to try to include more social or open features into its Web site. Strategies vary widely. Recently, for example, the New York Times started linking to other sites from its Web site, for example — though that effort still lets editors control what stories are pointing to.

The LA Times calls itself the largest metro newspaper in the country, with 2.2 million daily readers. The company said it also invested in Mixx, though the amount was undisclosed (see statement). The company said the stake was small.

Mixx launched in October (see coverage), partially as a way give newspapers and other publishers their own version of the popular news ranking site, Digg. But rather than letting hundreds of thousands of young techies dictate what is popular — as Digg does — Mixx gives control to the individual user. It shows them stories based on where they live and what their self-defined interests are. Its recommendation engine is standard, offering up content, including news stories, video and photos, relating to your previously expressed interests and location.

The company sees itself as being more than a competitor to Digg. It is also a competitor to personalized start pages such as My Yahoo, iGoogle, PageFlakes and Netvibe, chief executive Chris McGill tells us. It offers a one stop place for relevant news and other information, like those sites do. It also offers group and profile features, the components of a social network.

Mixx has signed deals with USA Today, Reuters.com, The Weather Channel, Kaboose and uclick Comics. It is owned by Recommended Reading, of McLean, Virginia. It had previously raised $1.5 million round of funding, in a round led by Intersouth Partners.

The service will be integrated into LATimes’ story pages.

In addition, Times’ content will be “optimized” for searches from within the Mixx site, suggesting results will be biased toward returning LATimes stories.

McGill served as the general manager of Yahoo News from 2000 to 2004 and the vice president of strategy at USA TODAY from 2005 until earlier this year.

The company is getting several hundred thousand unique visitors a month, McGill tells us.

Aggregate Knowledge’s technology, meanwhile, will be rolled out across the LATimes.com site over the coming months. Image here is an example of what Aggregate Knowledge provides for articles on the site. See this page, for example.