Digg needs to sell itself. Kevin Rose's headline-voting site is drowning; the more popular it gets, the more red ink it generates. But who needs a bunch of news stories rated? Here's an idea: Amazon.com.

What recession? More than 10,000 revelers are expected for this year's SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas this week. With no real work at hand, they're hitting the parties hard — especially the unofficial ones.

Kevin Rose, founder of the Web headline-voting service Digg, meets a fan Saturday after a live Diggnation taping at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.

Dear important scientist Tim Berners-Lee: Thank you for inventing the World Wide Web 20 years ago. It's really great and stuff! But were you aware of the crimes committed in your name?

Are all the Twitterers headed to the SXSW festival, like Digg's Kevin Rose? Actually, no! Here's where Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, Salon.com edi-bore Joan Walsh, and Politico's Patrick Gavin recorded their time-wasting thoughts:

Did you hear? Digg founder Kevin Rose was on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Wednesday. As was Rose's forgettable Diggnation cohost — what's his name? Ah, yes — Alex Albrecht, who we hear wants out.

Gasp! Village Voice Media abuses Digg. But ineffectively.

Having famously "plowed through" San Francisco's eligible bachelorettes, Digg founder Kevin Rose went L.A. for his most recent paramour, Shira Lazar. Who is this Web-video wannabe with links to Dov Charney and Julia Allison?

Digg, the raucous online news-rating site, has laid off 8 people from its 75-person workforce. CEO Jay Adelson writes that the company will "aggressively focus on reaching profitability within the year." There's no way.

Kevin Rose, the boyish founder of Digg, a testosterone-soaked news-discussion site, has resolved to "date someone seriously" in 2009. Specifically, he plans to woo Marley & Me star Jennifer Aniston.

Perhaps Digg really is the future of the news business. The headline-discussion site, once an icon of the Web 2.0 movement, is losing millions of dollars a year.

Do you have a question for Barack Obama? Sure you do! Barack Obama has a thing on his website where you can ask questions of him and the transition and, eventually, his administration. Of course, many politicians have these easily ignored comments sections for questions, on their sites, but this one is different: it's got Digg-style voting! So far there are 78,934 votes on 1,192 questions, and the winner is a lame softball along the lines of "what will you do to establish transparency and eliminate waste and how warm and nice, exactly, will the hug you give all of America be, once you're in office?" Surely the internet can "crowdsource" some better questions than that.

Earlier this year, Leah Culver appeared on the cover of a tech magazine blowing an enormous pink bubble. But the shrill-voiced San Francisco programmer no longer desires fame — even the modest sort afforded Silicon Valley's microcelebrities. The turnabout seems odd, considering how aggressively she once courted notoriety.

Digg poster boy Kevin Rose is so hot that 726 people have already subscribed to a Twitter stream on which Rose pretends to be a head cold. For context, New York Times reporter Matt Richtel has 819 followers to the novel he's posting as tweets. Note to self: Become a celebrity first, then take up writing.

Will the CEO of Digg make up his mind on who he wants to be? I once asked him what car he drove, and he took pains to let me know he had a suburban-dad Honda minivan and an environmentalist-standard-issue Toyota Prius. Just a regular guy! But he later complained when I suggested he wasn't a "rock star." I'm thinking Adelson — who commutes from his actual suburban-dad life in upstate New York to his CEO gig in san Francisco — is working on sexing up his image. A tipster says Adelson has just gotten a $109,000 all-electric, obsidian black Tesla Roadster. Which, if you think about it, is exactly the racy kind of vehicle most suburban dads his age might want to buy, if only they could afford it.

It only takes hearing so many jokes about Al Gore inventing Twitter to figure out that the former vice president has signed up for the microblogging service. Wisely, he's not really participating in the site, just using it to market his websites and announce his interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose, which airs tonight on Current, the Gore-backed cable channel. Current and Digg have been teaming up for a series of election-related events, including a party on election night. But Rose and Gore's acquaintance goes back almost two years.In late 2006, Gore's Current made an offer for Digg which valued the social-news startup at $100 milion or more. Wonder if Rose and Gore discussed business at all in this interview. As VentureBeat recently pointed out, Digg's traffic is flat, and it hasn't significantly increased its valuation since Rose and Gore's 2006 chat.

Forget hacking voting machines; our media brethren are, at this moment, most concerned with gaming Digg to get out the vote for their stories about Barack Obama's apparent victory in the electoral college. (Our sister site Gawker was late to the game; its headline submission for "Obama Wins!" was seventh in line, judging by the URL.) Taking the lead: "Digg This If You Voted for Obama!" with more than 20,000 votes. It points to a CNN.com story. New media serves merely to confirm the victory of old media.

Want to watch North Carolina gyrate to a hip-hop beat? Tune into Current, Al Gore's user-generated cable channel. I don't mean people dancing in the streets; I mean an outline of North Carolina pulsating. The channel is carrying, on live TV, headlines you could read on Digg and messages you could read on Twitter, along with video snippets from current viewers. Other than that, it's offering the same kind of exit-poll projections you could get on CNN, but in hot pink and cyan instead of the traditional red-blue-gold color scheme. Digg founder Kevin Rose pops up occasionally with live updates from a San Francisco night club where Current, Digg, and Twitter are hosting an election-night party. It's Web 2.0 in your living room — and it makes me wish I could Brillo-pad the "vision" out of "television."

Click to viewWhy is Kevin Rose on a publicity binge? In the past two months, the founder of headline-voting site Digg has garnered two magazine covers. There he is, with a smoldering leer on local San Francisco magazine 7x7. The look reminds everyone why Diggnation cohost Alex Albrecht once said that Rose, a prolific dater, has "plowed through everyone in town." For Inc., Rose participated in a wacky crowd shoot which echoed the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night." It's obvious why Rose is a hot commodity: Write about him, and traffic to your magazine's website will soar. (Will he sell print copies? I doubt Digg users visit newsstands.)It's obvious what's in it for the magazines which write about them. Rose makes a compelling story, even if Inc. had to resort to ridiculous hyperbole:

We're not sure we buy Inc. magazine's cover math, any more than we believed BusinessWeek when that magazine told us Digg founder Kevin Rose was worth $60 million. But the cover is impressive. (As are Rose's biceps. Photoshop?) Your suggestions for captions are welcome in the comments; the best will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: DrewFinch, for "All your data are belong to us." (Photo by aprilini)