Digg is close to announcing its sale to a major media player for $300 million to $400 million, according to sources close to the company, I hear. When I floated this Digg rumor past some knowledgeable friends, several scoffed: "When isn't Digg up for sale?" It's true: The news-discussion site is perpetually in talks — but we hear the price tag always sinks potential deals before they're consummated. CBS, for example, backed off, with effervescent dealmaker Quincy Smith citing the media company's bubbly $280 million purchase of Last.fm as the reason it couldn't bid a high price for Digg. Things are different now, though.

Digg is in talks to buy companies CoRank and Meneame, says the Social News Insider. Meneame is a popular Spanish-language Digg clone. On CoRank, users can set up their own versions of the headline discussion-and-ranking site based on topics of their own interest. Digg has not yet responded to requests for comment, though it's possible cofounder Kevin Rose is waiting for his hair to grow out before making any major announcements.

I blame Twitter. It's not enough to be a website anymore. Oh no. You must be a platform. Have an API. Court developers. Build an "ecosystem." Whatever. You know what an application programming interface really is? An admission that you're too poor, cheap, or uncreative to build all the features your website needs. Pownce is the latest to 'fess up to its shortcomings. The file-sharing and messaging site has released its own API. Incomplete, naturally. Maybe they can release an API for their API and have someone else finish it for them.

While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "stepped-up" LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman; FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, who's rolling in Googlebucks; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale; Evan Williams from Twitter; Mashery's Oren Michels; and
Kevin Rose (and his new haircut) from Digg with Joshua Schachter from the Yahoo-owned Del.icio.us. One question: Is this really Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg? I don't recognize him looking so unnerdly. (Photo by: bradley23)

Valleywag has a secret informant on the Big Island of Hawaii, where venture capitalist David Hornik is throwing his no-agenda, all-schmoozing conference The Lobby. Our spy, whom we've dubbed "The Lobbyist," reports that the hotel where it's being held is also hosting a meeting of the California State Athletic Association. That means, of course, that Hornik's hand-chosen geek squad is looking even more pasty and out of shape next to the hot, young sporty set. (One wonders if Digg founder Kevin Rose's new haircut is getting him some play with the female athletes, or if he's staying faithful to longtime love Sarah Lane, who's with him in Hawaii.) Today, attendees are on a scavenger hunt. The contestants, inexplicably, are wearing long pants, despite the 90-degree weather. But we're sure that the site of their legs would be blinding. Central Station Alarm Association, which makes this whole item far less funny. (Photo by bradley23)

Everyone's heard of Kevin Rose, the genial, constantly drinking founder of Digg and host of the Diggnation webcast. And everyone's used to his sleepy-eyed, mopheaded good looks. Well, forget the mophead. From this Valleywag spy photo pic we spotted on Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream, Rose got a buzz cut before flying to Hawaii for VC David Hornik's exclusive Lobby conference. Does this have something to do with that Captain America comic? How will his online-video fans react? Will his Diggnation numbers plummet? And will women continue to ask him to sign their breasts? (Photo by bradley23)

If you haven't kept up with the latest Captain America comic plot lines, you may be in for a shock to learn that the virile symbol of American patriotism is dying and he has to choose a successor from among a band of merry marines and office trollops. But who lurks over his left shoulder? Is that ... drowsy-eyed, hunky Digg founder Kevin Rose sporting a Diggnation T-shirt? We'll have to wait until January 2008 to learn if Rose and his Digg army can save America from Al-Qaeda — and if Marvel, publisher of the comic, has mastered the fine art of Diggbait.

After wooing San Francisco at its hub airport, Virgin America has enlisted seven Internet heroes to pitch the new airline. Seen here are Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing; Peter Rojas of Engadget; and Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose of Diggnation. You can see them in these Virgin cartoon spots, which are like C-minus episodes of Sealab 2021.

A double birthday party for GigaOm biz-blogger Om Malik (pictured with operations manager Joey Wan) and Spark PR founder Donna Sokolsky fogged up the glass patio walls at Jack Falstaff on Friday. I happened to be at the bar, hoping to catch dreamy god-mayor Gavin Newsom doing paperwork again. After the jump, the best overheards.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Coming to a browser near you: "People who liked this article also liked these articles." That's right — according to founder Kevin Rose, Digg is getting ready to do to news what Amazon.com did to shopping. At a panel at Technology Review's EmTech conference, Rose said that Digg would be launching a "suggestion service" in a few months. It's a natural move, after Digg introduced social-networking features that let you better track the headlines your friends find interesting; mining that data to find patterns and present users with similar articles just makes sense. Still, it could spell a radical shift in news consumption — a move that brings us closer to the vision of the "Daily Me," a techie vision of a completely personalized news outlet. (Photo by Lane Hartwell for Valleywag)

"We think technology is a high adventure." — Technology Review editor-in-chief Jason Pontin, shortly before welcoming Kevin Rose to the stage at his magazine's annual EmTech conference. You don't say, Jason, you don't say.

Ah, we remember a day when relations between the creators of Pownce, the online message board backed by Digg founder Kevin Rose, were, well, kinder. But now Pownce coder Leah Culver, pictured here, has started a spat with Rose, using his own Digg site to accuse Digg of copying Pownce. Digg has added more social features, it's true — and considering that Digg and Pownce share employees, is it really surprising that they'd look similar? Perhaps Culver has reconsidered the charge, having deleted the Flickr screenshot she used to illustrate it. Considering that one of the double-time workers, Daniel Burka, is Culver's ex, we suspect that there may be more to this drama than mere user-interface issues.

The biggest problem with becoming an extremely popular website with extremely vocal and loyal users, like the social news site Digg, is ... being extremely popular and having extremely vocal and loyal users. Your audience can never be pleased: Some want new features, others want old features refined, and others want no changes at all. While the newly introduced social-network features seem unobtrusive, and in keeping with Digg's headline-rating focus, most Diggers simply want commenting improved and a promised images section added. And they're enraged that the new features were revealed in an old-media BusinessWeek exclusive prior to appearing on Digg's own blog.

"I dropped my iphone :(" says Kevin Rose, co-founder of social sites Digg and Pownce. Best caption wins an iPhone ringtone version of "Umbrella."

AOL's Digg clone, formerly branded as Netscape and already pronounced dead, will be rebranded as Propeller. The announcement came from Tom Drapeau, the head of AOL's Netscape division since Jason Calacanis's brief tenure. Muhammed Saleem, a Propeller editor né Netscape Scout, thinks technology sites should be eating their hats for the grave predictions. Maybe the site would have had a chance at life and competed with Digg, the social news site, if it had launched with original branding instead of misusing the name of the already-dead Netscape. But AOL angered and turned off a loyal community when, under Calacanis, it killed the original Netscape and, after Calacanis's jealous pursuit of Kevin Rose, its own Digg clone — even if the sites ignominiously remain on life support and AOL refuses to accept that its time to pull the plug.

Social news filter Digg has spawned imitators, including Reddit and Slashdot's Firehose. Oh, and the late, unlamented Netscape. "Ripping off" is practically a core tenet of Web 2.0, though we suppose it sounds nicer if you call it "iteratively evolving industrywide best practices." One creative Web designer and Xbox fanboy, though, decided the Internet needed a Digg dedicated to Microsoft's Xbox consoles, so he created Diggxbox. As you might imagine, it uses its own version of Digg's user-driven filtering to sort the day's Xbox-related news. It's even adopted cute videogame touches like the Xbox's "red ring of death" as the "bury" button (as Digg's mechanism for voting "no" on a story is known). Cloning Digg is easy, but attracting a fanatical userbase like Digg's is another thing altogether.

Tom Drapeau, the current head of Netscape at AOL, is finally admitting that Jason Calacanis's jealous attempt to clone Kevin Rose's Digg was a failure. Sort of. Calacanis, who left AOL earlier this year to launch Mahalo, an also-ran Web directory, had hoped to persuade Netscape's loyal but dwindling base of users to embrace Digg's social-news model, where users submit headlines and vote on them to determine their ranking on the site. Drapeau confirms what TechCrunch predicted weeks ago — after initially denying it: Users do not want the Netscape brand associated with Calacanis's social-news experiment. But Drapeau continues to stubbornly insist that Netscapers "remain committed to delivering a compelling social news experience for our users." They just don't know when the site will be available, what it will be called, or what they'll do with it.

Inc. magazine is digging into the mystery of who's running TheFunded.com, a website which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists. Writer Max Chafkin makes four guesses: Gawker Media publisher and Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton; Digg founder Kevin Rose; Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams; and blog blowhard Jason Calacanis. Asked by Chafkin, Calacanis denied being "Ted," the mysterious man behind the site. A curious stance, since until recently, Calacanis was eagerly attempting to take credit for TheFunded.com. Never one for subtlety, he told friends of his plan to leak a rumor to Valleywag that he was behind the site. Alas, no, Jason: You only wish you were clever enough to come up with an idea like TheFunded.com.

Click to viewMore than one tipster tells us that Patrick Norton is leaving Ziff-Davis's DL.TV, and, after a brief paternity leave, joining Revision3. DL.TV, of course, was the brainchild of Jumpin' Jim Louderback, the former PC Magazine editor who's now Revision3's CEO. And before Ziff-Davis, Louderback and Norton worked together at TechTV, where Norton was the host of the popular "Screen Savers" show — the same show that later birthed Revision3 cofounder Kevin Rose's career. It's not a surprising hire, but it should answer any remaining questions about how crushingly insular the world of online video is.