Newsvine, the Seattle-based headline aggregator — think Digg, but without the heartthrob cofounder — has sold to MSNBC.com for an undisclosed amount. The company had raised a small amount of venture capital, $1.5 million, which has led some industry insiders to peg the price at more than $15 million, less than $35 million. Newsvine, like Digg and the rest, encourages users to discuss news headlines, but it adds a twist: So-called "citizen journalism," where users also write their own articles. To a cynic, allowing that just spells more loser-generated content. But for MSNBC, which has, since its birth over a decade ago, been struggling to embrace the Web, the prospect of viewers contributing reporting has double appeal. First, it potentially cuts costs, and secondly, it adds a much-needed appearance of hipness, as upstarts like Current.tv threaten to garner a more youthful audience.

In addition to sporting one of the most hilarious illustrations ever to appear in the Wall Street Journal, the "Wizards of Buzz" article trend piece on social media "influencers" really should be the reddest of red-meat linkbait, right? So how's the article doing on the sites it mentions?

Digg - 420 diggs as of this writing. Not bad, but not stellar. Reaction ranges from congratulatory to disappointment and getting interviewed but not quoted.

Reddit - 82 points. Much investigation into the identify of Reddit user "Adam Fuhrer," a supposed 12-year-old from Toronto. More here.

StumbleUpon - 435 stumbles. Little comment.

Del.icio.us - No sign of the WSJ article getting much bookmark love. 287 bookmarks actually.

Newsvine - 31 votes. Discussion is all citizen-journalish, of course.

Netscape - 95 votes. Commentary somehow devolves into a strange internecine squabble. Jason Calacanis present, though uninvolved in squabble.

• Batting .000 on his New Year's predictions, Firefox developer Blake Ross rushes out a second batch:

So Google counts over 23 billion pages on the Internet — who cares? Nothing's really online until it's been "Dugg," "Farked," and "Boing Boinged." And when your new quirky blog post ("Meta-Katamari George Bush MacBook Pro Naked") gets passed around the memepool, it'll be surrounded by John Battelle's ads.

Megite Technology sent a little PR intro touting itself as "the newspaper for anyone interested in what's happening right now." (The news is, of course, gathered from actual newspapers. And knitting blogs.)

After the New York Post reported that Google would buy Napster, a Google spokesperson denied any such plans. Looks like someone's trying to float a rumor and sell their stock. Meanwhile, Technorati's looking to sell its search tools, Six Apart might stay solo, and Digg.com is fighting lucrative sale rumors.