Miss your chance to catch the Digg Christmas dinner yesterday? Turns out Digg founder Kevin Rose will host another holiday bash tonight, this one for the folks at Revision3, his other startup. "They're having 2 of them. A Rev3 and a Digg," one source says. So what, Revision3 gets the leftovers?

We love a challenge. Supposedly Digg, Kevin Rose's news-discussion site, is having a party in San Francisco tonight. But we haven't pinned down the location. What is this, some top-secret rave? If you find out where it is, or just want to send in a report from the scene afterwards, drop us a line.

Can't a girl publicly humiliate her boyfriend by dumping him via her Facebook status message anymore without getting harrassed by a horde of social news readers? Nope. New York videoblogger Sandra Soroka tried to get away with it. The image above got over 1,600 votes on Digg. Somewhere along the way, somebody decided to exact revenge on poor Sandra, deleting all her photos on Flickr and replacing them with this one. And it's absolutely grotesque. Click, only if you dare.

Diggaholics — a category that includes me and most of my colleagues — no longer have to mine through a clutter of text to get your fix of Kevin Rose photos. Every time he gets a new haircut, goes on a date, breaks his iPhone, or, as in the photo above, dons a tank top, you'll see it on the front page of Digg's new dedicated image section, which will launch tonight, Rose confirms on his blog. Submitting an image is the same as submitting video or news, except for a few details. As Facebook does when you share a link with your friends, Digg will scan the page you submit and offer a choice of thumbnails. This feature will also pick up images from news stories. (Photo by Sara Morishige)

You already know how Digg works. Post a funny picture of Kevin Rose or a tribute to Apple's greatness and there you have it — you're on the front page. You're not wrong. But social media maven Muhammad Saleem says there's actually a little science to Digg as well. In a post on Search Engine Land, Saleem explains how Digg's algorithm does and doesn't work. He should know. Most of his recent Digg submissions have garnered several hundred votes. Good stuff, only it runs way too long. Here's our slimmed-down version.

Nerd idol Wil Wheaton claims to have seen the next version of Digg clone Propeller.com — and it's even clonier than before! "Holy crap are they awesome. I can't wait for it to go live," Wheaton Twitters. Propeller, formerly Netscape.com, was bulldog aficionado Jason Calacanis's attempt at building a better Digg by supplementing the wisdom of crowds with the snobbery of human editors. Interesting that AOL is still pumping money into the site. Maybe Propeller isn't sinking quite as fast as we'd thought?

Reports indicate Google is experimenting with Digg-like features for its search results pages. According to a Google help page, the trial feature lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. Google's been slow to implement social search functions like this, and for at least two good reasons, we think.

Though the timing of Digg's deal with the Wall Street Journal was coincidental, we're told, it has sparked a new wave of whispers that News Corp. might be taking another look at the headline-voting site. We've heard a very specific number bruited about: News Corp., rumor has it, would pay $340 million to buy Digg. And there's a new angle to a potential deal: At the same time, News Corp. would take a stake in Revision3, the online-video startup which shares founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson with Digg.

The online news-voting site Digg has added a page tracking the Democratic and Republican candidates for president. Digg's a virtual unknown inside the Beltway, so the page's geek-skewed results aren't a true barometer of candidate popularity. They're more a gimmick by Digg founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose to guilt candidates into participating on their site. Predictably, the Internet's unlikely favorites lead: Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel on the Democratic side, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee on the Republican side. You can view the candidates' favorite Digg stories — or rather, some anonymous campaign staffers' favorite stories. The lone holdout among candidates with a real shot at the nomination? Hillary Clinton. Her lack of participation shows she understands the true value of Web 2.0 in today's presidential election: none. An image of the current "Digg the President" leaders after the jump.

Don't like what you see in your Facebook news feed? You can now vote on it. As we first reported two weeks ago, Facebook is letting users vote items up or down. The final interface, a choice of "thumbs-up" or "X" icons, differs from the "plus" and "minus" design Facebook had been testing internally. While a user's voting will initially just change what he sees in his own news feed, Facebook could easily turn the vote results into a Digg-like discussion board. The new thumb icon just makes the potential rivalrly more obvious. After the jump, a full example from my own news feed.

Even more worrisome than eBay's losing $900 million on Skype to Wall Street is the lack of money the auction runner has put into its own site. Financial analysts worry about the site's outdated design and feature set. Enter Best of eBay, a new site with weird little monster icons, Digg-like voting features, and a name ripped straight from Craigslist, the classifieds site in which eBay owns a minority stake. Best of eBay is in beta, which these days just means "don't blame us if it's broken."

Digg has removed a posting to a site which features pictures and videos of scantily clad women and banned the poster. Well, it's perfectly within Digg's rights to ban adult content, isn't it? The only problem is the site, Fox News Porn, is a satirical collection of all of the skin and cleavage frequently featured on the attention-seeking Fox News network. If it made it past standards and practices censors at the red-state-friendly moral authority, shouldn't it be Digg-worthy? And isn't there more questionable content on Digg than Geraldo Rivera reading erotica? Digg doesn't agree — even after the site's creator politely tried to clarify his site's content and purpose. According to a site administrator, Fox News is broadcasting adult content. Someone tell Bill O'Reilly this. He could save a lot of money on loofahs.

"What would happen if a Web site's readers — instead of editors — could decide which stories should be published?" The Wall Street Journal posed that question nearly two years ago, in an article about Digg, the social-news website. Now, the Journal's editors are letting Digg users make those decisions for them. Articles on WSJ.com will carry Digg buttons, says Digg founder Kevin Rose in a blog post. When users "digg," or vote for, the stories, they won't require a subscription to read. Since it's easy to submit articles to Digg, this makes the entire website essentially free — or at least the stories Digg users care about. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, the Journal's new owner, has been making noises about dropping the website's subscription barrier. This deal with Digg pretty much tears down the paywall for him.

For at least the third year in a row, Reader's Digest has excerpted a few headlines from totally-not-safe-for-work humor/craziness site Fark. After the jump, why you Digg fans should stop snorting into your lattes.

Last week, we floated the rutemor that Digg might buy CoRank, a website which helps companies build their own versions of the popular website where users vote on and discuss news headlines. CoRank CEO Rogelio Bernal Andreo issued a flat denial to TechCrunch that the companies had held talks. But now we hear Andreo has been furiously backpedaling on that claim. Why? Shortly after Andreo talked to TechCrunch, but before the story ran, talks between the companies started.

Snooping on user profiles isn't the only special privilege Facebook employees have. They also get to test the site's latest features. Like news feed voting. Above is a mockup of my news feed as a Facebooker would see it, based on real screenshots from an inside source. (Showing a screenshot of his actual news feed would out my source to Facebook management, I fear.) Notice the "plus" and "minus" buttons? Those are new. Not yet available to the public, those will allow users of the social network to vote on items that appear in their news feeds. The news feed is a stream of friends' activities on the site, filtered by Facebook's algorithms which try to predict what you'll find interesting. Voting means users will have active input into those algorithms. If you're thinking "cute feature," think again. Here's why Facebook's voting-rights move is worth watching.

"I would like to deny that Fark will be sold for $750 million. I cannot confirm talks at this time. I also cannot confirm that Jason Calacanis has sex with sheep." That's what Drew Curtis, the acid-tongued, whip-smart founder of Fark, a social-news site which competes with Digg, emailed me after reading our rumor of the impending sale of his rival for $300 million. Curtis is obviously dismissive of the mooted Digg valuation. And I've heard lots of scoffing on that number — both ways. It tends to fall in an obvious pattern: East Coasters think $300 million is way too high, and West Coasters think it's way too low. Compete's Jay Meattle crunches the numbers and finds arguments for both sides.

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.

FROM THE DESK OF MEGAN MCCARTHY — Lawyers at Barnes and Thornburg, the law firm representing news aggregator Digg, have sent the proponents of rating site DigaSVGirl* a cease-and-desist letter concerning potential trademark violations. Digg CEO Jay Adelson explains:

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.