Kevin Rose:
Digg v4: release, iterate, repeat.  —  At Digg it's our job to try new things, analyze the usage data, iterate, and evolve.  While not everyone is happy w/the new design, as of right now the usage looks extremely good (ie. more people registering (43,000+ new users yesterday), digging, consuming, clicking, following, etc.).

Ben Huh / benhuh!:
Condé Nast, I'm publicly offering to buy Reddit.  —  This was an email I sent to one of our sites, The Daily What:  —  Hi TDWers, I'm Ben Huh, and I run the Cheezburger Network (which includes The Daily What, if you were too Prop 19'd to notice).  I have made this offer privately …

Chris Cameron / ReadWriteWeb:
Digg Responds to User Outrage: Upcoming Stories Will Return  —  Digg has had one heck of a week.  On Wednesday the social news aggregator decided it was a good time to make the switch to version 4 of its platform, which sent servers crashing and drove users bonkers.

Jordan Robertson / Associated Press:
PC industry's woes could mean bargains this fall  —  SAN FRANCISCO — If you're looking for bargains on personal computers, bad news from the industry could be good for your pocketbook.  —  Computer makers are scrambling for ways to goose faltering consumer demand after a weak start to the back-to-school shopping season.

mattlemay / bit.ly blog:
Introducing @clickabit  —  bit.ly has a lot of data, and we are always learning interesting and unexpected things from it.  For example: approximately .05% of URLs shared through bit.ly include content about cheeseburgers.  (An inclusive search for cheeseburgers and “cheezburgers” raises this figure to .07%.)

John Paczkowski / Digital Daily:
Einstein Would Have Used a Mac.  John Lennon, Too.  —  Steve Jobs in a turtleneck and shorts?  —  What a great bit of history this is, and a nice Friday diversion.  In the video embedded below, the Apple (AAPL) CEO introduces the company's 1997 Think Different campaign.

Paul Boutin / Gadgetwise:
Six Things Google's Free Phone Service Can't Do (and One It Does Very Well)  —  Google began rolling out a new feature on Wednesday to users of its browser-based Gmail service that lets them make phone calls over the Internet directly from their computer.  If they already use Gmail …

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
140 Proof Provides A Piece Of The Twitter Advertising Puzzle  —  Twitter has been open about its desire for advertising to be a pillar of its revenue strategy.  The company has launched a number of experiments with advertising on the site, rolling out Promoted Tweets, which serves up ads based …

Mike Shields / Mediaweek:
Yahoo's Who Knew?  Series Sees Streams Soar  —  Who Knew Yahoo had such a hit on its hands?  —  The five-days-a-week Web show Who Knew? is now Yahoo's most successful original series launch.  According to internal figures, Who Knew?—which rolled out its 100th episode on Friday (Aug. 27) …

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Early tablet executive leaves Microsoft  —  Bill Mitchell, a corporate vice president who lead some of Microsoft's early forays into tablet computing, has left the company in recent months, CNET has learned.  —  Although Mitchell has been gone from Redmond for a bit according to sources …

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Guess Who Is Trying To Trademark The Word “Face”?  (And Guess Who Is Trying To Stop It?)  —  When it comes to trademarks, Facebook is proving to be a bully.  It is going after Teachbook in court for using a similar name, and already forced Placebook to change its name.  But that is only half the story.

Ivaylo Popov / Google Code Blog:
Google Buzz API adds Track and some improvements  —  Let's say you're really interested in coffee and tea and would like to know every time someone talks about them.  You've been able to do that for the web with Google Alerts.  Now you will be able to do the same thing for Google Buzz with our latest feature: Track.

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Index Ventures Buys Into Etsy, Triples Valuation To Nearly $300 Million  —  Crafty commerce site Etsy just raised another $20 million in its fifth venture round (that would be the Series E).  Index Ventures is the new investor leading the round, with partner Danny Rimer getting an observer's seat on the board.

Jaikumar Vijayan / Computerworld:
FTC drops P2P file sharing probe of LimeWire  —  Agency cites upgrades to LimeWire software that aim to prevent inadvertent P2P file sharing  —  Computerworld - In a rare break for LimeWire, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week decided to drop its investigation into the embattled …

Miguel Helft / New York Times:
Developer of Tablets Loses Apple as Customer  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Apple severed ties with a small Silicon Valley design firm that for nearly a decade had helped with the development of some of its products, after the firm showcased its own prototype tablet computer.

Pete Warden / HubSpot:
The March Of Twitter: Analysis of How And Where Twitter Spread  —  To answer that question I created a visual history of Twitter's growth, feeding data from Dharmesh Shah (developer of TwitterGrader.com) into OpenHeatMap to produce an animated visualization of the service's growth …

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Facebook's “Platmobile” Team Working On Eliminating Mobile Password Entry  —  Earlier this evening, Facebook held an developer's garage event at their headquarters — sort of like a State of the Union for third-party developers.  Notably, they announced a new partnership with Y Combinator …

Suzanne Choney / Technolog:
Gmail calling takes off, but not without bumps  —  Google's Gmail “Call phone” link in the e-mail program makes it easy to place free calls — for now — within the United States and Canada.  —  More than 1 million calls were placed from Gmail's free calling service in its first 24 hours …

Kim-Mai Cutler / TechCrunch:
Microsoft To Pay More Than Half A Billion Dollars To Jump-Start Windows Phone 7  —  Editor's note: The following guest post is by Kim-Mai Cutler.  —  Nearly four years after Apple launched the iPhone and two years after Google open-sourced the code for its Android operating system …

Miguel Helft / New York Times:
Charges Settled Over Fake Reviews on iTunes  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Savvy Internet users know that glowing online reviews of things like books or restaurants can't always be trusted.  But federal regulators are giving notice that if you stand to gain financially from the review you are writing, you should be up front about it.