VentureBeat

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.

The latest roundup of tech stuff:

TrenchMice, a nice F***ed Company? — TrenchMice is a new site trying to mobilize people to submit and edit comments about businesses and employers. Let us know what you think. We tried using it to look for info on Google, and not much there yet. It is based in Seattle.

Pheedo’s new ad platform — The Emeryville start-up, which specializes in inserting ads within RSS feeds, has unveiled a new product. Called “Feedpowered” advertising, it lets advertisers write small articles for their ads, and then feed that text to any site via a little widget (see image). Alternatively, these ads can be fed directly to people subscribing to them. Expedia, for example, has locally relevant feeds, and some people may want to subscribe to keep an eye on good deals, Pheedo says. Moreover, Pheedo has added little social buttons, for Delicious, Digg and other sites at the bottom of the ad — so that you can use Delicious to save the ad to your bookmarks, for example.

Tough week for Google — First, a court rules in favor of Belgian newspapers that sued Google, demanding the search engine remove links to their stories. Second, Google complies with a court order to disclose to Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally uploaded episodes of 24 to Google-owned YouTube. This follows orders from Viacom to take down 100,000 clips. YouTube is slowly becoming a very different sort of place than it used to be. Wonder how its users will take this. Finally, a bunch of media companies are accusing Google of aggressively placing advertising on sites that Google reportedly knew were showing pirated movies. Not good.

MySpace lets media companies block unauthorized video clips — The biggest social networking site said yesterday it is offering a filtering/blocking technology provided by Silicon Valley company Audible Magic, for free. It helps identify the digital audio signature in a video file.

Veoh’s new look — The video sharing site, out of testing mode, has launched a site using peer-to-peer technology (a technology that users the computers of regular users) to distribute DVD-quality video, or better than the standard YouTube video. People upload videos and then can syndicate them to other popular sites including MySpace and YouTube. The company is backed by Michael Eisner, former chief exec at Disney, among others.

Intel’s new chip, with 80 processing engines — This is apparently a model of chips to be used within five years. Details here.