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The family of Sunil Tripathi endured much emotional pain as speculation swirled that the still-missing Brown University student was a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. Users of the Reddit social news site fanned the flames — and now they, along with the site's leadership, are apologizing to Tripathi's family.

The search giant says it inadvertently removed Digg, in its entirety, from its search engine... Digg, which bears little to no resemblance to the site it once was, is still alive and kicking as a curated collection of top news stories from around the Web -- just not in Google's world. If you queried Google for Digg links earlier this morning, you found that the search giant had no recollection that Digg ever existed. Seriously. As Martin MacDonald, an online marketing specialist, observed in a blog post, Digg disappeared altogether from Google's index.

Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz's request for a plea deal was turned down by federal prosecutors just two days before he committed suicide as he faced 30 years in jail for stealing academic papers, his lawyer has revealed.

A co-founder of Reddit and activist who fought to make online content free to the public has been found dead, authorities confirmed Saturday, prompting an outpouring of grief from prominent voices on the intersection of free speech and the Web.

Last to join the party, I've just recently started using Reddit. What I thought was a bunch of disjointed information has turned out to be an interesting source for work and fun. That kind of crowd-sourced information is making its way to the military through a Pentagon-created site called Eureka. The new site will join the group of military-friendly social sites under the label "milSuite," which resemble Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia and only carry unclassified material.

News.me, the social news service incubated at betaworks, announced today that it’s officially shutting down its iOS apps and removing them from the App Store. The company is also claiming that it’s yet another victim of Twitter’s latest API guidelines, and states that Twitter may have even viewed its service as a competitor. We might not go that far, but it makes for a good story.

Reddit, built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community of 20 million users a month, is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

In another social-media first, President Barack Obama took to Reddit today to become the first sitting head of state to moderate the site's "AMA," or, ask me anything, series. 
The chat lasted an hour, and got so much attention that it shut the site down during his post.