Digg | featured news

Digg users have already started to notice a new Beta feature called ‘Newswire’ that Digg announced on its blog this morning. ‘Newswire‘, a real time Top News section on Digg that ‘allows users ‘to be editors’ and help choose the Top News instead of just reading it.

Another much-requested feature has returned to Digg, as the social news site looks to recover from the version 4 fiasco: the bury button. The button — which is essentially the opposite of the “Digg” button and helps push a story out of the system — appears to be live on all stories.

Digg’s backers would likely be willing to sell the company now for as little “as $20 million to $30 million,” Arrington says. That’s a bummer, since investors have pumped $40 million into this outfit since it was founded in 2004, and Rose and his backers are rumored to have had chances to sell the company for $130 million.

If a recent poll from Digg founder Kevin Rose is any indication, Digg is considering bringing back the Bury button.

When it comes to releasing a new product, users and pundits’ opinions only count for so much, but numbers — including revenue and traffic– don’t lie... This week, the web analysts at Hitwise gathered data showing a 34% decline in visitors in the U.K. and a 24% decline in the U.S. in the past 11 weeks.

A redesign is part of the Web site’s plan to regain momentum as it has lost ground in a crowded field that includes Facebook and Twitter.

With the release of the new Digg on August 25th, anybody with the ability to understand how a story, which is promoted to the popular section, is composed, has an edge in attaining viral exposure ranging from tens of thousands to millions of pageviews. Diggs users constitute a large proportion of bloggers. Thus stories promoted to their popular section, which was previously their homepage and now the Top News page, can attain anywhere from less than 10 to hundreds of links pointing to their websites.