2010 is shaping up to be a terrible year for Digg, the once poster child of the Web 2.0 crowd. The much-delayed redesign (Digg v4) triggered a user revolt and drove away several dedicated users, key executives like Chas Edwards and Matt Williams are leaving the company, and now the site is facing allegations of gaming its own voting system to benefit its publishing partners.

Clever sleuthing by a Digg user has revealed the occurrence of large scale manipulation of Digg’s ranking system over the past couple of weeks. Immediately after Digg’s mystery tour of its algorithm, several users (159 of them, to be exact) signed up with usernames like a1, a3, a5, d1, d2, d3, dd1, dd2, dd3, diggerz10, diggerz11, diggerz12, s1, s2 and s4. All of these users then went on to digg upcoming stories in large numbers, more specifically, upcoming stories from Digg’s publishing partners like TechCrunch, Huffington Post and YouTube. In fact, these fake accounts almost single handedly pushed dozens of stories to Digg’s front page.

Impact of Suspicious Accounts on Digg (full stats)

While the evidence at hand is compelling, and it’s clear that some sort of an unfair practice clearly took place, there are plenty of unanswered questions. The biggest question for me is, why? Why would Digg need to game the system, when they can easily (and more securely) achieve similar results by tweaking its algorithm? Even if Digg felt the need to game the system, it’s hard to digest that they would be so crude about. They had to be aware of the risks involved. Digg has yet to issue an official response, but they definitely have some explaining to do.

Even before this controversy broke, things were looking somber for Digg. Earlier today, its CEO acknowledged that Digg was bleeding money and let go 37% of its staff (25 employees) in an attempt to reach profitability by 2011. Announcing the layoffs, Digg’s CEO Matt Williams wrote,

“It’s been an incredibly tough decision. I wish it weren’t necessary. However, I know it’s the right choice for Digg’s future success as a business. I’m personally committed to help find new opportunities for everyone affected by the transition. Digg’s Board members have also offered to help find placements within their portfolio companies.”

Digg was once the hottest Web 2.0 website in the block. Getting dugg meant instant fame, as Digg had the potential to send hundreds and thousands of users within just a few hours. However, of late, Digg has lost most of its charm. Reddit has emerged as a strong competitor with better social features, and a more welcoming (and mature) community. Digg’s deterioration started even before the catastrophic redesign. However, if users now start losing faith in Digg’s impartiality, this might just be it for the website that changed the way many of us consume news.

Update: Digg has finally responded. According to the official explanation, the accounts identified are indeed fake accounts that were being used by the Digg team to test potential shortcomings of the algorithm.

Digg users all over the world are particularly unhappy about the redesign and the Digg V4. However, another faction on the internet, the redditors have seen an increase in traffic after the Digg redesign.

From the very first day of the redesign, Digg saw a usurping revolt. The first page was flooded with Reddit links as a protest. The redesign has also brought some undesirable changes as the first page only shows links from top-notch blogs like Engadget. However, Digg has been biased about undoing the change and believes that it will get acceptance someday.

Reddit, on the other hand is enjoying this show as its own traffic has gone up by twenty-four percent. The coincidence of numbers is amusing even though their relation might be irrelevant. Everyone who leaves Digg will not necessarily join Reddit.

This war between Digg and Reddit took and interesting phase and the redesign being a #fail, Digg’s growth is a big question mark now. On one hand, it has already lost too much to continue any further while on the other hand, the growth and acceptance it was expecting will never realize down if Digg reverts to the earlier design. Digg has to decide and decide fast and right.

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Has it ever happened to you that as a webmaster, you change the design on your site and your readers hate it so much, they make life hell for you. Kevin Rose is in a similar situation right now because his Digg redesign is firing back on him. It has been quite some time now and Digg is still flooding with Reddit news on the front page.

The new submission system on Digg encourages users to submit their own content and this is saturating Digg just as it was earlier. Digg is notorious for being full of spammers and the submission system on site is in favor of big players like Engadget and CNN.

Funnily enough, the Reddit posts are submitted by the same auto-submission feature introduced in the new version of Digg. Now, as pointed out by many, it is not unusual for a site to get some initial resistance but this is massive revolt from users who are up-voting Reddit posts madly.

Digg is in trouble and it needs to respond fast to retain its dedicated users. People already hate the new but the defacing is what is more worrisome.

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According to Nate Lawson and Taylor Nelson from Root Labs, OpenID and OAuth, used to authenticate third party web applications and desktop applications to use web services like Twitter and Digg are under a risk of a severe security threat. In fact, the security flaw affects a host of other open source authentication services. The matter will be brought up at an upcoming security conference.

The flaw is based on the very controversial timing attack according to which, the attacker checks for the time required to analyze signatures and estimates if the first few characters of his attempted signature is correct or not. This process, if repeated can lead to a successful hack in theory. However, in practice, it is very hard to carry out or, that was the common belief until three years ago.

Three years ago, a timing attack was used to hack into  Xbox and the people who did this became geek gods. However, that was a direct interaction with the host. In case of a network, we need to consider many factors like network load, jitter and a varying latency.

What is remarkable is that Lawson and Nelson have claimed that they have executed this on a network as well as on a cloud and have gained sensitive information successfully. Any further details on this will be revealed at the upcoming BlackHat conference at Las Vegas.

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Earlier, we saw Digg launching new and improved buttons and widgets for blogs and websites. Now the Digg team has decided to shut down the Digg URL shortener on May 17th, 2010.

The Digg URL shortener doesn’t work if you want to shorten any URL other than a Digg story. However, if you had earlier shortened links using the Digg URL shortener, they will continue to work as expected.

Here is an official announcement:

As of May 17th, 2010, the Digg short URL feature will be available only for URLs that refer to stories submitted to Digg. Users will continue to be able to share their favorite Digg stories by generating a short URL via the “Share” button. However, it will not be possible to generate a short URL for a web URL that does not refer to a submitted story on Digg. The “shorturl.create” method in Digg API will be deprecated as of that date. Previously generated Digg short URLs will continue to operate beyond this date.

Users will be able to share Digg stories using the “Share” button but the URL shortener will not work for external URL’s. This move may be a part of the design makeover they are planning to implement, but why kill the old features which so many users use? First they removed the Digg bar and now the URL shortener, god knows what’s next.

Apache Software Foundation has recently announced the release of the Apache Cassandra Version 0.6. Apache Cassandra is a leading Open Source, NoSQL distributed database management system.

Cassandra is best described as,

Apache Cassandra is an advanced, second-generation “NoSQL” distributed data store that has a shared-nothing architecture. The Cassandra decentralized model provides massive scalability, and is highly available with no single point of failure even under the worst scenarios.

Clearly, it is a NoSQL database system and has a decentralized model making all the distributed components participating equally and eliminating the need of a single management point. This makes it reliable and prevents failures.

Cassandra is widely popular and is used in services like Cisco WebEx, Cloudkick, Digg, Facebook, Rackspace, Reddit, and Twitter. Facebook is an integral part in the development of Cassandra.

Chris Goffinet, Performance and Availability Architect of Digg commented on this release saying,

Digg is very excited to see Cassandra mature in the last year and graduate to a top-level Apache project. Cassandra is powering our next generation infrastructure, and allowing us to run in an environment that demands data access in datacenters around the world.

The new features in the version 0.6 are mainly speed centric. There is a 30% speed improvement in speed. Another feature is the Integrated Row Cache. This eliminates any need for an external caching layer. This makes the implementation and deployment a lot simpler.

The new version of Cassandra brings good news in times when Internet users and website loads are increasing tenfold.

Download Cassandra at http://cassandra.apache.org

Wouldn’t it be nice to share and view all the top stories at one place? It will surely save time and lessen our effort.

Digg.com does exactly the same. Digg has been a common resting place for most of us for quite some time. Now, it’s also available on iPhones. Digg, a popular social news aggregator has released its free app for iPhone which helps you to Digg and view top stories with just a tap from your home screen. Incidentally, it’s named TapTapTap.

Using this app, you can also view popular Diggs by topic (e.g., technology, sports, business, etc.) or forthcoming articles that are about to go popular. Also, you will find buttons to like or dislike the story, a button to save the story and an option to share the link.

Digg’s latest app provides a simplified interface making browsing Diggs real easy. No extra information apart from the stories is present. Even extraneous text about Digg features is absent. It is much easier on the eyes than the site, which comes loaded with tonnes of features, colors and text.

Bookmarking is one of the prime addition to iPhone’s latest app. Now you can browse your favourite categories and bookmark them, so that you can have a look at them later on.

Inspite of its benefits over Digg.com, it sure has some disadvantages. This app doesn’t allow you to post comments and it does not include the video or images section of the site.

Meanwhile be sure to keep an eye out on TapTapTap, which is expected to put some improvements in the coming weeks.

To celebrate the launch of iPhone’s Digg app, TapTapTap is giving away a ColorWare custom, very limited edition Digg iPad every day for 2 weeks!

For further information click here.

Digg is already planning a design makeover, but now they have rolled out major changes in their widgets and official buttons for blogs and websites.

The newer Digg buttons work the same way as the older ones. A reader can click the button to submit a blog post to the Digg site, where other users can vote on the story and spread the word about it. However, the newer buttons comes in different sizes and formats, so bloggers have more choice now.

Implementing the New Digg Buttons in Your Blog

The new Digg buttons requires that you place a single <script> tag before </head> tag of your blog template or theme. Then you can use <a> tags to call the script used in the header. If you want to implement multiple Digg buttons on your website, simply add an additional <a> tag. Do not use multiple <script> tags in your theme.

<script src="http://widgets.digg.com/buttons.js"

type="text/javascript"></script>

The Medium Digg button : Simply copy and paste the following code in your website’s source to integrate a medium sized Digg button.

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggMedium"></a>

The Large Digg Button: The large button looks good and if you get a lot of Diggs, use the following code to add a large Digg button in your blog or website.

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggLarge"></a>

The Compact Digg Button: The following code will show a compact “Digg this” button in your website. This button would suit good if you use a lot of other buttons and have really less place in the blog template for social media promotion.

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggCompact"></a>

The Digg Icon: Didn’t liked this one, however some of you may want to use it. You can show a tiny “Digg” icon using the following code:

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggIcon"></a>

Features of the New Digg Buttons

The new Digg buttons have some features worth pointing out:

1. Faster load time: Digg is chasing speed and that reflects in their recent developments. The new buttons load faster which is one of the major reason why you should consider a switch.

2. More Button Sizes: No longer you have to embed a large Digg button if your site do not have that extra space. With the availability of 3 new formats, customizing the “Digg” button is child’s play.

3. Auto Upgrades: The newer buttons will automatically upgrade when there is a new release, so there is no dirty hand coding, deleting old stuff and adding new codes. One code does it all.

4. The User Stays on your site after Digging: This is the much desired feature. After Digging a post, the user will remain in your site. From now on, you can expect a better bounce rate from Digg traffic.

The Digg Widget Generator

The Digg widget generator displays the latest Dugged posts of your site like a widget, which can be embedded anywhere in your site. You can completely customize the look and feel of the widget, adjust colors, width and other parameters.

If your blog receives a lot of Diggs, using this widget is a must because it will encourage your readers to vote the stories that are already popular and may be you can make it to the first page of Digg. More information can be found on the Digg blog.

Digg, the popular social news voting site is soon going to reveal an entire makeover and you can spot the sneak page at http://digg.com/new.

If you look carefully at the above screenshot, you can already spot a few changes. The voting thumbnails have grown bigger and there is a left column placed just to the left of the posts which contains links to popular stories, recent diggs and trending topics.

The redesign is expected to be live in a few weeks and as of now, the Digg team is preparing an email list to notify people when the redesign is implemented.

Earlier today, Mashable broke an Interview with Digg CEO – Jay Adelson where Adelson describes that the new design is expected to be more “clean” and “user friendly”. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

The site is shifting towards a personalization model, where the homepage will be based on characters like a user’s interests, location, who they follow not only on Digg but services like Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook), and other signalsfrom around the web like retweets, Facebook shares, and more.

The new Digg plans to support Twitter login followed by Google, Yahoo, Open ID and would be geared towards encouraging more submissions every day.

With about a day left for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the excitement is definitely building up for different medal events and the entire feel of the Olympics the once in four years event. For many the choice sport is Alpine skiing. This high-adrenaline sport involves skiing down a mountain with fixed-heel bindings on the skis. The slope of the hills and the speed that builds up is no laughing matter. Though the sporting events are done in controlled environments with little or no avalanches and trails without trees between them, adrenaline-junkies also pursue this sport in less-than-safe environments around any place where the infrastructure has led to the development of these sports. Julia Mancuso, the Olympic Gold medalist in alpine skiing from the United States is one of these Alpine ski racers who trust their skill and control with the frictionless yet dangerous floor of snow.

As a World Cup ski racer, she made her debut in 1999 at the age of 15. With several races and World Cups under her experience, she eventually won the Gold medal in the Olympic Games of 2006 launching her to stardom. One of the main reasons she enjoys her popularity is that people believe she can repeat the feat in this year’s giant slalom as well. However, she suffered from hip dysplasia (misalignment of the hip joint) through her Olympic victory and had to undergo a surgery the following year. She trained with her team following these setbacks and is confident of her skill this Olympic season, and thus fans have been quite encouraging through these months for her.

Digg.com, being a portal full of fans of different people, sports and games has created a Digg Dialogg which involves community-submitted questions voted on popularity which will be asked to Mancuso. From Trent Reznor to Bruno, many people have been questioned by the Digg user community and now it is time to ask your own questions to Julia Mancuso. However, be warned that you have about a day left to ask these questions. Make an account quickly in Digg and start firing Mancuso with your questions from alpine skiing to the brands she endorses!