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Digg founder Kevin Rose has gotten a reputation as “the boy who cried ‘wolf’” recently with some of his Apple “leaks.” He was dead wrong about many of the specs for the initial iPhone despite having a “source” and then he was wrong again in talking about Apple-built IM/video chatting coming to the iPhone 3G prior to its launch. As such, I was hesitant to write about his latest Apple leaked news this weekend, but he went on the popular podcast This Week in Tech (TWiT) today to talk about it even more — so I’ll put it out there with that big disclaimer.

Rose says there will be an Apple event on September 9 during which it will unveil new iPods and a new version of iTunes. While the entire iPod line will be updated, the major design update will come to the iPod nano, which Rose claims to have a picture of (below) from a source.

As you can see, the short “fat” version has been replaced by a long “skinny” version. The main feature improvement would seem to the screen, which is now in widescreen format when turned to the side.

While the iPod touch and presumable the iPod classic will also see small changes, the big news for them is that there are big price drops coming, according to Rose’s source. Rose believes is what was meant by the “future product transition” Apple chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer mentioned numerous times during Apple’s most recent earnings call.

That is certainly possible. While many assumed there would be some kind of new product which hurt Apple’s bottom line, it’s possible that price cuts on new iPods which trim profit margins could be the culprit. Apple’s rationale behind cutting iPod prices would be that at $199, the iPhone is now cheaper than many iPod models which do much less.

On TWiT, host Leo Laporte told Rose the image he had on his blog over the weekend looked like it could have easily been faked, so Rose apparently sent Laporte some kind of picture or document over email to further prove the device’s validity. Rose asked Laporte not to describe it in detail and he didn’t. It all sounded a bit juvenile, but we’ll take their word for the time being that this wasn’t just some joke.

Rose also went into more detail on the show about iTunes 8. Supposedly, the new software will look at all of your music and make new music recommendations based on that, a different source tells Rose. That seems possible as well, iTunes already looks at music you’ve purchased and serves up recommendations based upon that, the next step could be to scan your entire library.

To me, though, that idea is rather ho-hum versus a service like Pandora, which allows you to listen to new music you don’t already have and make recommendations based on that. The problem is that much of the music I have on my machine I might have liked when I was 18, but maybe don’t so much anymore.

Rose also stated he had not heard anything about an “iTunes Unlimited” subscription-based service. That makes sense as it’s probably not coming soon despite recent rumors.

The 2.1 software for the iPhone and iPod touch could be coming as well at this September event.

Again, there is a huge caveat with these rumors that Rose has a track record of being wrong on many of these things. We can’t just sure these rumors aren’t just a way to get readers for Rose’s newly redesigned and relaunched blog — or as a way to pump up his Twitter followers and send users to Pownce (a micro-blogging service he co-founded), which he mentions twice in his video below.

On TWiT, Rose also more and less described his sources on the information and random people who email him — and at one point said “the thing is, these are probably fake.” Also of note is that no one has apparently received an invite to this September 9 event, despite it being just a couple of weeks away.

It has to be noted however, that Rose also been right in the past, specifically when talking about the iPod nano before it launched.

Still, if he is completely wrong yet again, it’s hard to see why anyone would listen to him on these rumors. Even Kevin Rose can only cry “wolf” so many times.

It’s been a little more than a month since the last rumors surfaced about social news site Digg trying to sell itself for at least $300 million.

A reliable source just confirmed the company’s plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal. The asking price is still $300 million, the source said.

This will come as no surprise. Rumors of a sale have been rampant for months, although until now we hear co-founder Jay Adelson has been trying to muster up interest in a sale. This is the first time Digg has hired a bank to shop the deal, we’re told.

Valleywag reported the $300 million rumor last month. Separately, it reported Digg chief executive Jay Adelson’s attendance at Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley, Idaho get-together of the rich and famous, noting the company might be looking to find a buyer among one of the many media company executives in attendance.

Allen & Company traditionally uses the event to do what it terms “direct research” on potential buyers and sellers, then inserts itself as banker.

For more on the history of Digg rumors (including a suggestiong to “Hire A Banker. Sell This Thing, Already”), see Techcrunch’s post from last month.

We asked Digg founder Kevin Rose about a potential sale, and Allen & Company’s involvement. He told us, unsurprisingly, that “we never comment on things related to acquisitions.”

San Francisco news ranking start-up Digg has become a symbol of new-age Internet buzz, ever since its hyped cover story on BusinessWeek several weeks ago.

Now TechCrunch reports Digg has been in recent acquisition discussions with a number of companies, including News Corp. — with a price of $150 million being discussed.

Rumors abound of a possible sale. BusinessWeek cited sources saying Digg was worth $200 million, but that value was so out of whack with Digg’s revenue and usership base that it was hard to find credible. That, combined with the article’s other errors (partly documented in the comments), put the whole story into question. See this Red Herring piece, which suggests that based on a both user numbers and rules of thumb concerning value as related to revenue, the $200 million number is way too high, when compared to the MySpace acquisition.

Or was it? This is where we get into the game of unreliable statistics, and it gets extremely frustrating. If we don’t get more standards on stats, the industry will suffer.

Techcrunch caught word of early Google talks with YouTube, but it has caught word of other rumors that haven’t panned out. More notable, though, is its reference to the unreliability of traffic statistics. Specifically, it suggests Digg’s claim to have 20 million unique monthly visitors has created a bone of contention in the acquisition talks. Comscore shows Digg has only 1.3M uniques. As a result, the article suggests, Digg wasn’t able to get its bottom line demand of $150 million. Instead, the article concludes, Digg may decide to raise $5 million + from its backers, possibly Greylock Partners.

Now, when Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion, it was such a huge bet on the future of video that accuracy of statistics for YouTube usership may not have played a big role. Everyone knows YouTube is the biggest, and even if your measurement is one or two degrees off, you are going to do a deal based on basic hunches and not on whether video traffic today is at 30 or 35 percent market share.

But then there’s the other thing you can do, if you are really interested in buying a company — and it’s presumbably what News Corp and others did with Digg. You take a look at the targeted company’s own server statistics — which the company will surely show you if you are serious about buying them. Yet even these statistics are being thrown into doubt. Take a look at this recent piece by BusinessWeek, written by one of the authors of the original Digg story, about how unreliable statistics are. It tells the story of Seth Sternberg, chief executive of online IM site, Meebo, offering Comscore access to his internal statistics and trying to convince Comscore that its estimates for Meebo’s traffic are too low — to no avail.

Techcrunch says Comscore’s data are notoriously unreliable. Singling them out is a little unfair. Comscore may be off, but everyone else is off too. And the reason Comscore has become more credible for some people is because it is more conservative. It doesn’t count any of the junk page views, such as ad pop-up ads, that a server may count, for example. Indeed, more advertisers are requesting Comscore data for this reason. And thus a game begins to get played. Advertisers like Comscore because they can pay less to sites if the data shows less traffic.

In other words, this statistics problem has become big. We’ve written about it before.

By the way, we checked with Digg about this latest acquisition rumor, and here’s Kevin Rose’s response, as sent through a spokesman:

After the YouTube buyout there have been so many rumors and speculation about the future of Digg that we’ve made the decision as a company to not respond to any of them. As always, we’re focused on execution and cranking out future versions of digg — you can expect many cool new features coming very soon.

Also, here’s more background on the valuation discussion, from Red Herring article:

To look at this another way, the $200-million valuation is roughly 66 times current revenue. Put in context, when News Corp. paid $580 million for Intermix, the parent company of MySpace, the offer was seven times company revenues—and News Corp.’s offer was called stratospheric at that time.

Users can be another benchmark of a company’s value. At the time of the News Corp. acquisition, MySpace parent Intermix had 27 million unique users, valuing the purchase at $21 per user.

By that measure, if Digg were acquired for $200 million with 1.35 million unique visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix’ traffic estimates, it would be valued at $148 per user.

SlimDevices to release latest Squeezebox — The come-out-of-nowhere Mountain View start-up sells a device that lets you play your music anywhere in the house, and hooks up with all kinds of services, from Pandora to Rhapsody. Its latest one will sell for $2,000 device; the NYT has the scoop. This scrappy company is run by 20-somthing Sean Adams, and to our knowledge he has made do with a mere $330,000 from angels (though he may have raised more without us knowing).

ChaCha a new search engine, with guides — That’s right. This company is just like Google, only it pays its employees or contractors to help you refine your search. On the good side, this a really useful service, and we hope ChaCha will stay in business. But that is the mind-boggling part for us. Read the story in the Mercury News. Maybe we’re missing something, but if this service is really for free, how is the company going to make money? Yes, there may be search result advertising (including vidoes while you wait), but we don’t see how that will cover the costs. We tried it out, but got tired waiting for a response (ChaCha is supposed to average about a minute, but we gave up after five minutes waiting for answer we posed about how much venture money start-up Rojo had raised; it was listed on both VentureBeat and Gigaom, but ChaCha didn’t find it). And we were annoyed by the site, which made regular “swooshing” sounds, though don’t understand why (was it the ads?). Don’t want to be quick to criticize; we’re just raising these questions given the prominent coverage in media articles where the cost question isn’t really dealt with.

Band of Angels for India — The Band of Angels in Silicon Valley, a network of individuals who band together to invest in start-ups, has been fixture for years. They told us a few years ago they had no plans to go international. So now there is a Band of Angels in India, led by the same guy Alok Mittal, who also happens to run the new office in India for Silicon Valley venture firm Canaan Partners. See more at Gigaom.

Digg to respond to criticism about clique influence — Responding to criticism that a small group of influential “Diggers” are controlling what news gets to the site’s home page, Digg chief exec Kevin Rose says he’s found a way to counterbalance their influence. He said a new algorithm will “look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be [needed] to deem the story homepage-worthy.”

Has eBay become the investment bank for Web 2.0? — With Web calendar company Kiko being bought on eBay for $250,000 by another company Tucows, this is a question being posed lately about eBay being posed lately. Om first joked about eBay setting a new floor on investment banking fees about a few days ago. Now Techcrunch is talking about it as a serious way for Web 2.0 companies to be bought. There are more showing up. Indeed, why don’t companies place a permanent listing at eBay, disclosing the lowest price they’d agree to be sold for — even if they aren’t desperate for a sale yet? They can keep changing the offer price, depending on their own assessment of their promise. In Kiko’s case, of course, the company had run out of steam, and wanted to make whatever it could from a sale of its assets. And Tucows, which wanted a basic calendar company for its own use, made the move. Tucows probably wouldn’t have found out about Kiko without eBay. Conclusion: The risks associated with starting a Web company, already reduced because of the very low costs involved, have just gotten even lower. Maybe that’s why you see even more Web calendars still launching (the company hassome differentiating features such as voice-enabled entries, and new ways of synching.)

Woz’s book, and Steve Jobs’ change of heart — Valleyway runs with some news that it concedes might be a tad old; but we hadn’t seen it. It is about Woz’s book, and why the Apple co-founder couldn’t get his former colleague, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, to write a foreward. Perhaps no one saw news about the book until now because the latest, from the DailyNews, has a much more colorful quote from Wozniak:

“We wanted him to do a foreword, but he declined,” Wozniak tells Jacob Bernstein this week in WWDScoop, the new magazine from Women’s Wear Daily. “He felt the book sort of portrayed me as a good guy and him as an a-hole.”

Among other anti-Jobs anecdotes, Wozniak recalls in the book that when he invented a universal remote control and sent it to Jobs, he threw it against a wall, stuck it in a box, and mailed it back. “Steve had a fit about it,” Wozniak tells Bernstein. “He was under the impression that I’d left Apple in a very negative mode.”