Putting to use knowledge gained from the Internet, a Connecticut teen was arrested for attempting to shock a classmate—literally shock a classmate—with a rigged disposable camera.

Twenty years ago, this would have earned you detention. In light of certain third graders, though (among other nightmarish events), it means calling the cops.

Online news aggregator startup Publish2 has raised $2.75 million in funding from Velocity Interactive Group, a digital media investment firm.

As expected by its model, Yahoo Buzz sends plenty of traffic to the news publishers who have agreements in place with Yahoo to be part of their new social media site.

New Hitwise statistics create an interesting comparison between Digg and Yahoo Buzz.  Depending on which side of the "blogs and personal websites" and "news and media" divide a site stands, it seems the second entity is either almost worthless or nearly as valuable as the first.

Purported interest in Digg by Google and Microsoft made for a hot rumor earlier, but Digg CEO Jay Adelson said rumors is all they were.

The following results from my little, informal study are hardly definitive, but they are interesting. Someone following up with a more intensive and scientifically rigorous quantitative analysis might find the same thing I did: stories related to Barack Obama are submitted more often to Digg.com than stories about Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Ron Paul.

On the tech side, Google takes the prize against Microsoft, and stories about Microsoft outpace Linux.

Fickle yet valuable, traffic from social media sites represents a way of generating lots of page views in a very short, and profitable, period of time.

Digg’s feisty user community will have a chance to question Kevin Rose and company about the site and its attendant issues on Monday night.

Valleywag is reporting that Yahoo is planning on launching Yahoo Buzz, a social news site that will rank news based on popular search results and user voting. Buzz will be designed to compete with Digg, which is all well and good, except that it will have a particularly nauseating twist: Only sites that run Yahoo Publisher Network ads will be shown on the site.

Hey Everyone, The Zune Software is currently up on Zune.net.

» You can find the software HERE. System Requirements

A joint project by Ask and Digg led to the opening of BigNews, a service for tracking important and widely discussed news stories.

An advertisement appeared on a freelancing site, offering $250 in exchange for getting a couple of movie-related items to the front page of Digg.