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.

No wonder Digg, the nerdly news-discussion site, is dumping Federated Media, John Battelle's online-ad network, as the source of its ads. Lately, FM has outdone itself in precisely targeting its clients' demographics. First, it delivered a $15 off coupon for midpriced casual clothing chain Fashion Bug for Michael Arrington's tech news site TechCrunch, perfect for that blog's target audience of middle-aged Midwestern moms. Now FM is displaying banner ads promoting the American Girl line of books and dolls whenever I visit Digg, as pictured in the screenshot above. John Battelle, how did you know I was completely obsessed with those books ... in fifth grade?

So Brad Fitzpatrick, Jay Adelson, and Jimmy Wales walk into a bar ... sorry, the only joke here is how the creators of LiveJournal, Digg, and Wikipedia — three top experts on social networks — wasted their weekend. If they walked into a bar, I'd hope it was to drink away their sorrows after discovering they flew out to Austin, Texas for a whole lot of nothing. That's the word I've gotten, anyway, from attendees at last weekend's "We Are All Actors" conference, organized by the League of Technical Voters, a group campaigning to make the Federal budget less obscure. "The meeting sucked, actually (didn't stay on topic, more or less skipped important agenda items, stupid shakespeare/actors theme, etc)," read one passed-along report. Typical, if disappointing. And telling.

'It's the wisdom of the masses that makes up our front page,' says Kevin Rose. He is the founder of a Web news site called Digg that rates stories, videos and other content on the basis of how many people like them. Editors need not apply; Digg is proud to have none. Of course, the "wisdom of the masses" produced a few 20th-century bummers, not least in Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and China. Collective wisdom is often an oxymoron.

Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose, interviewed together on the second episode of the GigaOm Show? Of course, the "fur would fly" — or so hosts Om Malik and Joyce Kim promised. Despite recent photographic evidence of a peace accord, Calacanis did, after all, try to undercut Kevin Rose's Digg social-news site with a revamped Netscape during his short tenure at AOL. So, did the claws come out?

Digg, the social news site that inspired a thousand knock-offs, was created (well, commissioned) by Slashdot user Kevin Rose after the venerable tech news site dismissed his suggestions. Now the old green lady has introduced a "Slashdot Firehose" page that vaguely reproduces the Digg method of listing headlines and allowing users to vote them up or down the page. But compare these current Digg headlines to some Slashdot heds.

What on earth could bring together supposed mortal enemies Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis? Why, Om Malik, of course. Rose is the founder of Digg, and Calacanis, the blowhard entrepreneur who created a Digg clone when he was an executive at AOL. But love has conquered all that. First, there's Malik, the cuddly tech blogger, a friend to all. And, perhaps more importantly, there's Malik's stunning cohost for his new Internet TV show, "The GigaOm Show." Lawyer-turned-videoblogger Joyce Kim, you see, is Calacanis's sister-in-law. Family trumps all. The four were among the stars at a launch party that Revision3, Rose's online-video company, threw for Malik and Kim Wednesday night in the tower of San Francisco's de Young Museum. (Revision3 is producing and distributing the show.) New Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback looks like a weatherman and talks extremely loudly. (My boss has nicknamed him "Jumpin' Jim Louderback.") After the jump, a gallery of photos from the glitzy affair.

It's not you. It's me. We can still be friends, right? That's how I translate Digg founder Kevin Rose's blog post announcement that Digg is dropping Battelle's Federated Media as its online-ad rep and signing up with Microsoft. Says Rose:

MEGAN MCCARTHY — "Pownce is the new pink," declared Valleywag's capricious new editor Owen Thomas in assigning me to go cover a party thrown by Leah Culver and Kevin Rose, cofounders of Digg. The new pink? More like the new pot. The microblogging site, which people use to send around URLs, MP3s, and updates on their lives, is just as coveted — invitations are still up for sale on eBay — and seems to leave its users just as unproductive. So what better place to hold a party than a pink castle of a house in the Castro owned by Dennis Peron, one of the heads of California's medical marijuana movement? A list of Internet-glamorous attendees, a crime scene, and a photo gallery, after the jump.

When entrepreneurs hire, they turn first to the people close to them. But how close? In the case of Digg founder Kevin Rose, that means hiring his ex-girlfriend Sarah Lane as director of production for Revision3, his online-video startup. People close to Rose and Lane say she was "the love of his life," which should make things awkward at the office. Lane, you see, married someone else after breaking up with Rose.

Sun Valley, the quiet Idaho ski resort town, is about to get a charge from Silicon Valley. Allen & Co., the New York investment bank, has been holding an exclusive conference there for 25 years, but until recently, the invite list has been limited to old-media moguls. On the invite list for this year's conference, which kicks off tonight: Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg, the social-news website, which he cofounded with Kevin Rose. Here's why we think Adelson's on the list — and who else might show up.

Kevin Rose, the web wunderkind, has revealed his new project, Pownce, which apparently allows us to "share stuff." Maybe the community is partially to blame for the hype surrounding the creator of Digg and Revision3 (the former is popular and influential, the latter just received funding), but Kevin does his fair share of self-promoting, and he doesn't have to believe his own hype. He is not Superman — something he may not yet be aware of. This third project could finally expose the young entrepreneur to a little failure and humility.

Right! There's a new editor in town and he commanded that I tell you our new Digg policy! There'll be no more foolin' around here, so listen close! (Executive summary: We don't care what you digg, go nuts, but it's your funeral.)

Arianna Huffington, personality and political blogger, continues to embrace all things new and Web 2.0 by introducing Digg-like functionality to her self-named web property, The Huffington Post, or Huffpo for short. Dubbed, unsurprisingly, HuffIt, the beta service apes Kevin Rose's voting and news aggregating service Digg. Although not a direct threat, the introduction does shed light on the challenges facing Digg.

NICK DOUGLAS — "Your account was banned for the rate of Digging activity you've engaged in," an official message said to a user of the social news site Digg.com (according to this blog). "We've determined that the time in which your Diggs happen, it isn't possible to actually read the stories." Why, asked another blogger, can't Digg just force users to click through to stories before ever hitting the "digg" button? Actually, the answers to that say a lot about common sense and number-pumping.

NICK DOUGLAS — Okay, Digg's co-founder isn't so much "on Sesame Street" as he is "on an Internet puppet show about Toronto web designers." Kevin Rose and his friends Alex Albrecht (Kevin's cohost on the Diggnation podcast) and Leo Laporte (creator of the TWiT podcast network) star as themselves in this surreal episode of the dotBoom show involving beer, design and mortal combat. Watch it at dotBoom or below.

NICK DOUGLAS — The general geek public associates one name with Digg: Kevin Rose. He's the social site's public face, and no wonder: he spent years as a TV show co-host, and he's the younger and edgier of Digg's two co-founders. So in the aftermath of Digg's decision to let users illegally publish a code, why is his partner and CEO Jay Adelson giving all the interviews? He's the one who talked to the New York Times, Fortune, Wired News, and BusinessWeek. Because they got funneled through the same PR firm that I did.

NICK DOUGLAS — 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. Apparently that number (represented in hexadecimal here) is a key used to decrypt movies from DVDs. Because it helps bypass technological locks arguably meant to protect copyrighted information, publishing it may violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It could definitely earn a takedown notice from a regulatory group. A user posted this number on Digg. The post rose to the front page on the social news site, whence it disappeared. So someone posted it again. That post earned a record-breaking 15,000+ diggs: that's 15,000 Digg users voting it up, one hundred times the diggs on a typical front-page post. And then it disappeared — utterly deleted. So why is this a big deal? See below.

NICK DOUGLAS — The users of Digg.com are a horde. But so was the ass-kicking fighting force of Genghis Khan. And remember in Mulan, when Genghis's A-team pops out of the snow after an avalanche buries their army? The top users of the net's biggest social news site are like those guys: superpowerful...well...somethings. Don't insult these people by offering them a dollar a digg; don't hire them away to a lamer version of the site they love. Here are six jobs at which Diggers could excel.

NICK DOUGLAS — An industry of "knowledge workers" and no one knows how to speak English! "Back at the LA office to give a quick prezo," wrote PR blogger Steve Rubel. That's it, time for more bans on heinous Silicon Valley non-language.