ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Revision3, the IPTV network founded last year in part by Digg’s Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, has announced a new show to their already large line up. XLR8R TV (pronounced “accelerator” TV) is an underground music show that they hope will attract an untapped niche crowd as well as the attention of advertisers.

According to the show’s homepage:

XLR8R TV is a monthly show featuring interviews with and performances by the groundbreaking musicians and artists you’ll find in the pages of XLR8R magazine.

XLR8R magazine and website publications are dedicated to music, style, culture and technology. Founded in 1993, their scope was on electronic music and has since broadened to encompass the hip-hop, indie rock, reggae and dancehall music genres.

XLR8R TV will cover the same content covered on their website and magazine, but will use the show to shed light on emerging artists. A new episode of XLR8R TV will be released on the 1st of every month, with an extended edition in the middle of each month to include three music videos from artists they cover. The show is hosted on location, and will be comprised of interviews of music artists and their fans, and of course will include music by those artists.

You can watch their first episode here.

Digg today announced the inclusion of two new subcategories. I expected the addition of the “Microsoft” subcategory of Technology News, a reincarnation of the Windows section that was removed from the much earlier versions of Digg. It was only a matter of time before they realized that Digg needed to reintroduce a section to complement the Apple section.

More importantly though, and a bit unexpectedly, Digg announced a temporary subcategory under World & Business News called, “US Elections 2008.” This is surely in response to the overwhelming popularity of the Politics sections on Digg, which is evident in the past month’s Digg Presidential Statistics.

With the addition of the US Elections 2008 section, Digg only further defines it’s role as a news medium and will join the likes of YouTube in its growing influence in the 2008 presidential election.

A recent study conducted over the last 30 days of Digg News submissions shows the amount and kind of attention each 2008 hopeful is receiving. You can see as the author points out, a clear organized burying of Ron Paul submissions, due to allegations that supporters of Ron Paul are spamming Digg.

It should be expected that 2008 hopefuls will keep a close eye on their support in social media sites like Digg and YouTube, as such sites can be great measures of their popularity and the popularity of their positions, especially among the younger voting population. However it should be noted, both by supporters and the candidates themselves, that using Digg to push themselves in an unfairly positive manner will get noticed and cause an adverse affect on their popularity among the community, which is proving to have a greater influence as a news medium as time goes on (the contrary holds true as well).

Looking at the number of submissions each 2008 hopefuls have received in the last 30 days, you’ll notice that it highly correlates with both name recognition and the amount each is covered in the press.

The list below is in ascending order according to number of stories submitted.

Here’s a link to the original published source.

Do you ever feel like Peter Gibbons in Office Space? Do you want to be liberated from being a zombie to the corporate cubicle lifestyle? Then maybe you should consider making your living online in the new economy. Web Worker Daily has compiled a great detailed list of the 10 new ways to make money online in the new economy.

Here’s an look at each method mentioned:

1. Offer your professional expertise in an online marketplace.
2. Sell photos on stock photography sites.
3. Blog for pay.
4. Or start your own blog network.
5. Provide service and support for open source software.
6. Online life coaching.
7. Virtually assist other web workers.
8. Build services atop Amazon Web Services.
9. Write reviews for pay or perks.
10. Become a virtual gold farmer.

Visit Web Worker Daily for a far more detailed overview of these methods, including links to in depth articles on each method.

Gizmodo is proposing that everyone put their money where their mouths are, and boycott the RIAA during the month of March. They make an important point; we are in effect feeding them the money they need for their lawsuits. The power of the purse is no new idea, and can be an effective method to send a message, it is simply incumbent upon the parties affected to organize and assert their power.

This doesn’t mean you should necessarily start pirating everything. There are still legal ways of sticking it to the RIAA, as Gizmodo points out:

Firstly, I encourage everyone to purchase music from unsigned bands and bands on independent record labels. There are tons of great artists out there, many of which you’re probably already a fan of, that have nothing to do with the RIAA. Buy their records at eMusic, an online store that sells independent tunes in beautiful, DRM-free MP3 format.

Secondly, you can still support RIAA-signed bands without buying their music. Go see them live and buy their merchandise; they get a hell of a lot more money from that then they do from album sales. And hey, you could benefit from getting out more, couldn’t you?

If you are unsure whether or not an album is put out by an RIAA label, the handy RIAA Radar will clear everything up for you. They have both a search engine and a great bookmarklet, so be sure to get yourself hooked up.

Actions speak louder than words. It’s time we stand up and take action against the unethical and often illegal practices of both governmental and corporate entities that have, for too long, gone uncontested.

Last year Business 2.0 magazine published the 2006 Next Net 25 list, which outlined the top 25 Internet startups that were most likely to succeed. It is important to note that three of the startups mentioned in last year’s list were acquired by Google; Jotspot, Writely and who can forget YouTube. Several other sites mention in last years Next Net 25 list, also went on to garner greater popularity and deals.

This year they have have decided to continue the tradition and name 2007′s Next Net 25. They’ve compiled this list into five categories; social media, video, mobile, online advertising and enterprise applications. They believe these sites have the greatest ability to prosper due to their innovative concepts and their promising business models. With formidable contenders like MetaCafe, Wikia and Joost on the list, surely some of the sites mentions will cross the chasm into mainstream culture.

TechCrunch is reporting that Digg founder, Kevin Rose, just announced at the Future Of Web Apps conference that they will be supporting OpenID later this year. This is big news for the decentralized online identity system, which has been gaining a lot of momentum lately after the recent news that AOL and Microsoft would be adopting the online identity platform themselves.

The news that Microsoft was supporting OpenID was big enough, as they wouldn’t be the most likely supporters, considering this is something they failed to do with their Passport system. Now with the support of Digg, a driving force in the Web 2.0 movement, it looks like OpenID may become the digital identity standard that Microsoft’s Passport Network failed to be, for it lacked the decentralized nature that OpenID is founded on.

(via TechCrunch)

Everyone is familiar with Google’s youthfully idealistic “Don’t be evil” mantra that has awarded them great praise from their users as well as scrutiny from the press anytime they falter on that promise.Such high aspirations appear to be the trend among the young founders behind some of the Internet’s biggest names.

Another example of this trend would be Digg, with their equally ambitious principles upon which they founded their company.

Digg’s recent decision to remove the top users list underscores their commitment to retain non-hierarchical editorial control and is a prime example of one of their idealistic founding principles. What’s more, Kevin Rose himself has stated numerous times, that it is Digg’s intent to drive traffic back to the originating site. This being the reason why they have not implemented a caching service for sites downed by the “Digg Effect.”

In Kevin’s own words from the October 2nd, 2006 issue of Newsweek:

We really want to continue to drive traffic back to the original source and give credit back to the authors of the articles. It’s really a symbiotic relationship between the two, because we can’t exist without these good, quality sites and the content that is provided online, whether it comes from a blog or from a major media outlet.

Kevin Rose Future Of Web Summit Speech Audio Clip

Now look at a recent statement by Kevin on the December 18th, 2006 Digg The Blog blog post announcing new features:

Videos Enhancements
Aside from giving Videos their own position in the top navigation, we have added a couple cool features: Top 10 hottest videos, and on-Digg video previews. Simply click any video with a play icon to get lightbox window in which you can preview and Digg the video.

This means that Digg has implemented a feature that embeds the submitted video within Digg for users to watch without leaving digg.com.Currently only three video sites have been included in the on-Digg video previews; YouTube, MetaCafe and Google Video (College Humor has also been included in the thumbnail previews, but not the on-Digg video previews feature). As Digg has mentioned in the past, if you run a video site and want to be included in their thumbnail and video preview features on their site, you should email them and they will do what they can to accommodate your site.

Now while this seems like a great feature for digg users, it directly infringes upon one of Digg’s most important founding principles; driving traffic back to the originating site. This is especially dangerous for video sites, as it has the potential to hurt their profitability. Digg has previously driven significant amounts of traffic to both prominent and emerging video sites, allowing them to generate ad revenue from the surge of traffic they received on their site, which allows them to generate the cash to needed to cover the high bandwidth costs associated with being “dugg.” Digg is still using up the same large amount of bandwidth from these video sites, but now they aren’t returning anywhere near the amount of traffic to the originating site, which means they generate little to no ad revenue by being “dugg,” and still have to pay for the huge bandwidth costs associated with the “Digg Effect.”

I know from personal experience with helping run Colbert On Demand that it is very difficult to successfully monetize an emerging video site to the point of profitability (as well as to scale it) due largely to the unevolving state of the hosting industry. With this move of embedding videos directly on Digg, it detracts from video sites ability to generate revenue from their content when being “dugg” and can affect their ability to become profitable.

This is only the first instance of Digg infringing on a founding principle that, has to this point caused webmasters around the web to praise Digg and work to better integrate their site with Digg. This could cause a turning point in the support webmasters have given Digg, especially if Digg implements further features that detract from sending traffic back to the originating site.

Here’s some interesting news about two of the most popular social media sites, that I thought I’d share.

A conversation I recently had with Stephen Searer, of Inside Social News, turned into a great blog post about The Birth of Digg.

BusinessWeek has a great article about the business benefits to the new Digg tools that are in development.  They take a look back on how suggestion features on websites have evolved over the years and how they are being utilized for better ad targeting.

On an amusing side note: Digg is looking for a repair man who can fix their Dig Dug tabletop machine.  The developers have threatened to stop coding if it doesn’t get fixed!

Details were recently released about the financial details of the Google YouTube acquisition. – via CyberNet News

Viacom, after demanding YouTube remove 100,000 clips, is planning to revamp their Comedy Central site in a move to retain control over their intellectual property, while evolving with new mediums of distribution/media.

Google Reader is a great webware RSS feed aggregator, but it isn’t without its fair share of flaws.

1. Search: ability to search through your feeds like you can in Gmail. The fact there are two methods currently available to add a search feature to Google Reader should be justification enough for the demand for such a feature.
2. Same Story Consolidation: Google News does this, it would be a natural addition to Google Reader in order to root out redundancy amongst your RSS feeds.
3. New Story Notifications: Many software based RSS aggregators allow for pop-up notifications to alert their user to news that was just published. Why couldn’t Google Reader do the same thing with their webware based RSS aggregator much in the way they do in Gmail with Gtalk IM notifications (though this would certainly require the ability of user customization). Furthermore many users want to see the integration of the Gmail and Google Reader services, as there are also two methods created to combine these two great services together. It would also seem a logical enough of a move for Google to create standalone Greader software application that does the same thing, but has the benefits that come with a software application.
4. Aggregation Speed Increase: Google Reader has issues with speed when it comes to delivering your content to you via RSS. Often there can be a regular 1 to 2 hour delay in receiving your content via RSS, from when it is actually published.
5. Solve Overflow Memory Leak Problems: The ability to auto-refresh or just manually refresh your RSS feeds in Google Reader is a great feature, but the downside is you will find all those feeds build up in your session, and if your running Firefox, this can cause some serious memory leaks, if you use it frequently.

The application of these 5 features and fixes for Google Reader could make it formidable contender in the RSS reader market.