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The social news voting site Reddit took a step outside the norm back in January when it announced it would allow any Reddit user to create their own custom Reddit. If you liked candy for example, you could create a Reddit devoted to that and restrict its usage to ensure only the people you really wanted participated in your community. However, these custom Reddits still very much retained the look and feel of the actual Reddit, and thus they looked like more or less what they were: Sub-pages. That changes today.

Custom Reddits creators will now be able to fully customize the look and feel of their site as well as the domain name, according to a post on the Reddit blog. The look and feel element is changed by manipulating the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) of the site (basically, using a fairly simple language to manipulate items like text size, text color, background images, etc..). You can also upload your own header image.

The bigger news may be that you can also now use your own custom domain name. Previously custom Reddits were found at the URL: http://reddit.com/r/YOURREDDITNAME — now you could use for example, CandyVotingSite.com. This is done by way of a custom CNAME, which gives your Reddit site an alias. This is the same way some Blogger and Tumblr blogs among others have their own customized domain names.

Since Reddit rolled up a major redesign back in May, it says traffic is up 300 percent. That’s impressive, but still doesn’t put it anywhere near its main rival Digg, according to numbers from web analytics company Compete. Ultimately, its bigger move may have been the opening of its source code, which it did back in June. Though it’s not yet clear how much that is being used by developers.

To spur growth even more, Reddit is also today announcing a contest for users who successfully launch their own custom Reddit. Any new Reddit or an existing one with less than 250 users has one month to grow their site as much as possible. The winner will get a bunch of stuff including a MacBook Air laser-etched with the Reddit logo, a $1,500 Apple gift card, a bunch of Reddit gear and some bacon, apparently. There are also prizes for the runner-up and the community that is best designed with the new customization level.

Obviously, this reeks of people going out there and spamming everyone they know to try and pump up their Reddit, but the site warns that this will not be tolerated.

I created one such custom Reddit back in January that has gained some popularity. Unfortunately (for me), that popularity makes it ineligible for the current contest.

Reddit was bought by Wired in late 2006.

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.

In the arena of crowd voting sites there is Digg and then there is everyone else. Every once in a while a challenger will come up that looks promising, but it fades away.

For a while that was Netscape (now called Propeller), then it was Mixx, but now one of the original (and best) challengers is coming back with a vengence. Reddit.

Today the service is announcing that it is going open-source. This means that any developer will have access to the sites’ code and will be able to help improve upon it.

The code for the site can be found here: http://code.reddit.com.

In theory, this could also pave the way for other sites to build their own voting systems based on Reddit.

While Reddit itself hasn’t been able to catch Digg (statistics from Compete show Reddit growing at a faster pace than Digg, but the site is still roughly only 1/10th the size), crowd-sourcing is exactly in line with its ideals. One thing that separates Reddit from its competitors is that it has a large programmer crowd, site co-founder Steve Huffman told us. These individuals often have ideas for how to improve the site and now will be able to actively participate in doing so.

Huffman also noted that since Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast (the parent of Wired) in 2006, the site has grown to 4.4 million monthly uniques and 120 million monthly pages views. He also notes that 23 percent of the sites’ users have signed up since it rolled out its user-created Reddits in January. (Disclosure: I started one of the more popular ones of the those, the l33t Reddit, but I gain absolutely no financial or any other incentive from it.)

When asked specifically about Digg, Huffman would only say that Reddit has stayed true to its ideals — which indicates his feeling that Digg hasn’t. He noted that Reddit will only censor content in the most extreme circumstances, whereas Digg has gotten into trouble with its user base for doing that in the past.

Reddit also allows users to see who is voting a particular story down as well as who is voting it up. This lies in stark contrast to Digg, which will show you who dugg a story, but will not show who buried it. This has led to many accusations that the site is fixed or that there is a “bury brigade” out there who work to carry out vendettas against certain sites.

Huffman noted that this idea to open source Reddit has been in the making for several years. It felt like now was the right time because several other projects Reddit is working on will rely on this openness.

Reddit unveiled a major redesign to the site last month and also announced plans for a TV show in partnership with PBS.

It will be interesting to see if Digg responds to this move by Reddit. It’s probably unlikely. It simply doesn’t need to at this point.

When I think of PBS I think of Sesame Street, Masterpiece Theater and Nova. This fall, however, there may be a new show to watch for on the public network: YourWeek, a collaboration between the station and the social news voting site Reddit.

The show, which will run once a week starting June 6th, makes a compelling case for why you should watch it: You can help decide what’s going to be on it. Topics for the show will be chosen every week from the hot stories on Reddit’s main page. The items chosen will then be put on a separate page at yourweek.reddit, where the service is encouraging the community to participate with comments.

The hosts of the show, which will exist online at first, will be Michelle Cottle and Rich Lowry. This online trial over the summer will determine if the show makes it to the PBS channel in the fall, according to NewTeeVee.

The obvious parallel here is to online video network Revision3’s Diggnation show. That weekly show features Digg founder Kevin Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht talking about some of the hottest stories on the social news site Digg, one of Reddit’s main rivals. “No offense to Kevin and Alex, but I expect the discourse to be a little higher. I don’t think the hosts will be drinking beers,” Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian tells NewTeeVee.

A little higher, maybe. But don’t expect it to be much higher. The pilot features a story entitled: #1 Reason to See a Cricket Match in Bangalore: Cheerleaders. Washington Redskins Cheerleaders.

If the show is successful, it’ll be the social interaction with the viewers and the Reddit community that make it so. From the official post on the Reddit Blog:

Whereas traditional television new stories end once the show airs, YourWeek — like reddit — will just be the beginning. Throughout the week you’ll be able to share your thoughts on yourweek.reddit and followup with content you think was missed or corrections that should be made.

Reddit was purchased by Wired in 2006. Both exist under Wired’s parent, publisher Conde Nast.

(Updated at bottom with more discussion on differences from Digg, others)

Thoof is the latest company seeking to offer news readers articles that are relevant to them.

The Austin, Tex. company launched today, boasting an approach it says is more useful to the wider masses than competitors such as Digg, Reddit, NewsVine, NowPublic, Topix and others that seek to rank articles. Thoof’s trick is to latch on to information it finds about users’ news tastes, store this information in a place where it constantly updates its list about you, and then steadily improve its service.

It is founded by engineer Ian Clarke, who left the video-sharing site Revver last year, where he had been a co-founder and chief scientist. Two other Revver employees have joined him.

After an initial review of the site, we’re convinced this has great potential, and are keen to see it succeed — because most other efforts have failed to do this job well. By its nature, Thoof does better the more people use it. It depends on user-submitted articles, and so the volume of stories in its system is small at launch. We found no articles on “finance,” for example.

Here’s how it works, and why we endorse the concept.

Like Digg, Thoof provides a synopsis of articles on its home page — this includes headline, brief summary, and tags to designate topic matter. It then provides a link to the article, and sends the reader to the original source.

That’s where the similarities with Digg end. It doesn’t let other readers rank the articles for you. Rather, it offers articles to you based on what knows about you, such as IP address (which provides geographical location), the browser you use, your operating system and the site you were on when you clicked through to Thoof — all of which offer subtle clues about you. Then, additionally, as you search articles, it tracks the tags of the articles you read. Finally, it may soon begin asking you a random question from time to time, to gather more information.

Next, it lets you correct the article summaries. See screenshot below, where the arrows show the multiple ways you can correct a piece. You can propose a change, but it must first be approved vote a vote by members of Thoof’s community. Right now, that community consists of just three people, but Thoof hopes more members will participate as traffic grows. This correction process gives Thoof a leg-up on Digg, which has suffered notorious accuracy problems.

This project is way too early to know whether it will succeed or not. A long-shot? Yes. However, Clarke has put deeper thought into this than we’ve seen in some other throw-it-together jobs on personalized news attempts over the past couple of years.

Before Revver, Clarke built Freenet, a very early decentralized P2P technology designed to let people obtain information on the Internet while avoiding censorship — for use by people in China, for example. He attempted to commercialize the technology, forming Uprizer, but left in 2002 and dabbled in a number of projects.

At Revver, Clarke says he learned the limitations of collaborative filtering technologies used by companies like StumbleUpon and Amazon.com. These services offer you content — music, articles or whatever — based selections by others who have shown similar choices you’ve made in the past. However, the technology slows the more users are added to the system. It also doesn’t work well without the user first surfing for hours — so that the system can track selections.

Clarke also sought to avoid problems faced at other companies: Digg is dependent niche crowd of tech-savvy young males selecting stories, and can’t get out of its rut, he says. It offers no personalization for the rest of the world’s audience. Reddit meanwhile, tends to be politically slanted, and lacks corrective features, thus pointing to the need for editors. Finally, Wikipedia does a good job with editors, but breaks down when dealing with controversy. Some entries, on President George Bush for example, get “locked down” to avoid constant edits by fringe interests. A group of editors voting on changes deals with controversy, Clarke concluded.

Clarke wanted to build an algorithm that can store unlimited amount of information about a user’s interests. Thoof seeks to pinpoint personal tastes in more sophisticated ways, using Bayesian statistics. He points to a company called Cycorp, which is developing large knowledge base, feeding information into it like the “sky” is “blue.” He’s licensing information from a company doing something similar, but wouldn’t specify.

Thoof is built on a Java-based open-source framework called Wicket.

It has raised $1 million from Austin Ventures and angel investor Ron Conway.

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Updated

Collactive is a new company that lets users mobilize friends and others to get more attention for causes they care about by overwhelming news-ranking sites such as Digg.

Users identify articles or video clips they care about, and then specify what actions they want their friends to take, such as voting for the video or article on Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, YouTube and other news sites. Collactive blasts the request out to the user’s contacts, and makes it easy for them to vote for the story on the news-ranking sites. See screenshot below. There’s a story about it today in the WSJ.

It provides links to the user’s cause “bulletins” so that friends can post it on their Web sites. Collactive, a Delaware-registered company with operations mainly in Israel, is backed by Sequoia Capital’s Israeli office (Update: funding amount is $2 million). The service is free for individuals, but will charge businesses, politicians and some nonprofits for usage. Apparently, it has already been used successfully by the Genocide Intervention Network, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit, to boost visibility about the conflict in Darfur, Sudan.

Notably, it is run by Eran Reshef and Amir Hirsh, the co-founders of Blue Security, a company that developed an innovative anti-spam technique: It would deluge spammers by sending them massive amounts of spam back. While momentarily successful, a Russian based spammer counter-attacked, and brought Blue Security to its knees about a year ago. Ironically, the co-founders have joined the other side, using what they’ve learned to essentially spam news sites under the pretense that is for good causes. Blue Security had been backed by Sequoia’s rival, Benchmark.

Here’s the latest wrap-up of Silicon Valley tech news:

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone name — Who cares? If Apple loses, it will come up with a different name. Like, ApplePhone, or iPodPhone. Details of suit.

Yahoo signs deal with Akimbo to deliver video to televisions — Just the latest move in a huge number of deals pushing video to your TV. More details here.

Avvenu shares music via link in email — Avvenu, a Palo Alto start-up has been around for a while, but has introduced a new service for sharing music. By downloading a free music player, users can select tracks they wish to share (250 for free) and send links to friends via email. Recipients click on the link to listen for up to five days. Users sharing their music must have iTunes software downloaded, though recipients don’t. Works on Windows mobile software, too.

The latest on Jeff Bezos’ space project – Here’s the scoop from Amazon.com’s Bezos on Blue Origin, which reveals a cone-shaped vehicle to be used “to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.” Tests have already been made, though the program has some ways to go.

MyBlogLog sold for reported $10M, after no venture capital, and then spammed — The service, which lets bloggers and others see who is reading their blogs, and where those readers tend to go afterward, has sold to Yahoo for a reported $10 million. MyBlogLog became popular last year, after its little widget started showing up on blogs with the pictures of their readers. Some 45,000 bloggers had signed up for it. Om talked with chief exec Scott Rafer. Lately, though, some have showed it is relatively easy to spam.

Update on Techdirt’s analyst service — As reported (see here), Techdirt raised $600,000 to build out its Insight Community product, which hooks up expert bloggers with companies that seek their advice. Mike Masnick (left), of Techdirt, who has built the company without outside investments over the past decade, tells VentureBeat he finally bit the bullet, realizing it made sense to raise money to help build out the project — given all of the interest he’d received in it. It is still in testing mode, but he’s now building more interactive features, letting people in the network communicate with each other, rather than limit it to one-to-one relationship originally envisioned. Entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, one of the investors, joins the board. Also, investors were all outsiders. Insiders didn’t participate, as suggested earlier by the PEhub report, Masnick said.

Slideshow company Slide raised $20 million — We’d reported Slide’s venture round last year. Reports suggest Slide raised $20 million, giving it a valuation afterward of $60 to $80 million. This gives it some runway, even as competitor Filmloop lays off most of its workers. Here is our earlier story.

Weatherbill, an online site to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses — Sounds boring, but it has all the Map mashups and other Web 2.0 candy to make it worth a look (via Techcrunch)
It has raised a first round of round of financing from NEA, Index Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Second Life has opened its application to developers — Many people find the virtual world Second Life difficult to get the hang of, which has no doubt limited its growth. Now it has opened its software for developers to provide alternatives. It isn’t clear whether this will spark a vibrant developer community or not.

Podzinger searches words in YouTube videos — Podzinger gives you a way search for words that are mentioned in YouTube videos. Podzinger has a tab letting you do this on its front page, and it tells you how many minutes and seconds into the video the reference is (although we couldn’t figure out how to zip automatically to the reference, like Pluggd does). More details here, at Splashcast blog. Blinkx is another company that searches audio and video files.

PayPerPost drops its purchase of Perfomancing assets — Details here.

Aaron Swartz, of Reddit, not done dreaming — Good piece in the Chronicle mentioning the impressive rise of Swartz, who built his first web site at 13, got bored, and then, circuitously, ended up building Reddit, which was bought by Wired Digital. Now 20, he says he’s headed back to academia soon. Re hanging out: “I’m so shy I don’t even hang out with the people I know now.”

Hype at Asiatech? — Days ago, we reported on the purchase of software developer Mediabolic by Macrovision. Sources told us the return was marginal, giving later investors slightly more than the money they invested. But it was no where near a two-fold return claimed by AsiaTech investor Katherine Jen in an interview with VentureWire recently, they said. Jen did not respond to a request by VentureBeat for comment about her “2x return” claim.

See Jobs’ demo of iPhone — It is striking, and worth it. See here, and click on “touch navigation” for starters.

Wired Digital, the SF company that owns Wired magazine and Wired News, has acquired Reddit.com, a news site that lets its users select and rank web content

The purchase price is unknown, suggesting it wasn’t for much, but the Boston start-up was founded only last year, and was built on a mere $100,000 in funding. It is a competitor to San Francisco’s Digg, though is the lesser known.

Wired’s parent company, Condé Nast, has used Reddit technology to launch a beta site, Lipstick.com, focused on celebrity news. The company said it hopes the Reddit acquisition will bolster Condé Nast’s presence online.

Reddit’s four founders, based in Boston, will relocate to San Francisco. They received $100,000 funding from seed investor Paul Graham’s group, Y Combinator.

The four founders of Reddit are Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz, and Chris Slowe. TechCrunch says the company averages 70,000 daily unique visitors.