UPDATE: Yahoo! Will Buy Digg For $30M Hmm... Guess Kevin Rose made a smart move leaving G4, or as some like to call it, G-whore. Congrats to the whole Diggnation team if this is true. That's absolutely my favorite podcast.

Said Kevin in a denial on the Digg blog, "So, just to set things straight - we are not in talks with Yahoo. We are focused on creating new features and expanding digg into new areas beyond tech. The recent reports about digg and Yahoo! are just rumors, nothing more." Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny says, "(no comment on today's acquisition rumor, sorry)" Hmm... I have NO clue as to the validity here. I tend to err on the rumor being correct, but what do I know?Wonder if the Web 2.0 rumors are true that Digg is being courted by Yahoo!?

Yahoo! would be silly NOT to be courting Digg.

My question is, are they buying Digg because of:

Their Popularity?
Their Features?
Their Podcast?

I'm guessing their podcast and popularity are FAR more important than their features. Not that their features aren't great... DiggSpy is very neat, but I tend to think ideas like that are quite easy to emulate, once some smart programmer loses their morality and copies it.

Plus, there are so many social bookmarking sites out there right now, why buy something SO similar to Del.icio.us if not for their users?

Digg reminds me a whole lot of MySpace. Digg/MySpace are by far the leaders in their industry right now, and it wasn't so long ago they were the imitator and the little man on campus. No one ever thought Del.icio.us and Friendster could be toppled, their momentum was simply too high.

Then came Digg and MySpace and the old court (which was really not very old in offline time at all) was dead.

Side note: Del.icio.us seems to be less popular than Digg, but is in no way dying the way Friendster seems to be languishing. Well... At least Del.icio.us WAS acquired, poor Friendster can't even accomplish that. :(