So what changes on Digg? Well, this won’t impact anything on Digg today, but user influence and the data we collect during this process will play an important role in upcoming versions of Digg.

Original Article 05/18: Digg Founder Kevin Rose says that there are some big changes coming to Digg this year. In an interview from April with Mike Arrington, Rose calls the changes "a ballsy move," but does not give too much away.

"I will say this," he says. "I don’t want to get into specific details about the product, but I believe that it’s time for Digg to get a little bit more real-time in nature. And we need to be a living and breathing site. And you know, that’s an exciting direction for us. I think that’s part of the reason why we rolled out a pretty awesome search. It was kind of us experimenting with some of that."

Rose says that there will be a logo change, and that the site itself will be getting a revamp. I take this to mean that the whole thing will be getting a redesign.

Digg better hope that this goes over well with users, because they have probably seen enough controversy this year after the launch of the DiggBar. This riled up webmasters and the SEO community when it replaced URLs with Digg URLs, though the company eventually made some adjustments to appease them.

With regards to an upcoming real-time version of Digg, Arrington calls "real time" secret code for Twitter. This shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise to anyone. This is certainly the trend that social media as a whole seems to be gravitating towards.

Those heralded A-listers we all looked to over the past few years? Many of them are hanging it up. Mike Arrington: handed over the TechCrunch reins to hired staff. Jason Calacanis: moved to email. Their chief complaints: fame. Too many haters, too much spit in the face.

Dan Lyons

This week’s quitter is Dan Lyons, the Newsweek writer who rocketed to blogsopheric recognition because of his satirical blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, now soured on "another high-tech fairy tale." His reason: there’s no money in blogging. The day the New York Times blew his Fake Steve Jobs cover, Lyons says, “more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.”

Every tech blogger’s Silicon Valley heyday nemesis—which has reduced staff to exactly one blogger—Valleywag was quick to note Lyons scored a book deal out of his little experiment with popular anonymity. And it was well deserved. The Fake Steve Jobs idea was a well-played stroke of genius.

This crop of A-listers aren’t the first to have blog-related meltdowns. They may be, though, the first to really go and stay gone. Self-proclaimed original blogger Dave Winer is known for periodic threats to stop blogging. Yet, he still blogs. Robert Scoble, chief among the famous-for-blogging-and-I-wrote-the-book-on-blogging elite, is prone to emotional denouncements of the craft and self-imposed mental health hiatuses. Yet, he still blogs, though to a lesser degree.

Some people just can’t help it. They have to blog. Like it’s a sickness. Some are victims of their own success. Fame isn’t, by nature, for everyone, even if fifteen minutes has been edited down to five public-commentary-abusive ones. And still yet others are disillusioned victims of hype and zeitgeists.

This list of types could go on and on. There are as many reasons to blog, or not to blog, as there are people. One thing is for certain: we seem to be at a blogging crossroads. Sadly (but perhaps naturally), pivotal, transformational (and sometimes bloody) moments are often misconstrued as deadly ones. Blogging has reached a crucial moment in its evolution, one where competition for money, credibility, and attention has never been fiercer. The weak, those whose prime devotion is getting rich, getting famous, getting laid, or getting approval will be culled. In the end, as in the beginning, it’s about purity and (some type of) artistic integrity. 

When I was in the fifth grade I joined the basketball team along with 40 of my friends. I was a chubby ten year old counted among the first who would give up when faced with laps and suicide sprints and leg lifts, pushups, and sit-ups as the coaches sought to weed out the weak and uncommitted (and produce a more manageable basketball team). And, after a week, I nearly ran home to enjoy Grandma’s gravy and biscuits in my-body-doesn’t-hurt peace. My mother, though, reminded me of my commitment, and by the middle of the season—when the coach had become fed up with his starting fast little waifs—I earned my starting forward position and never felt better about myself.    

Blogging, I think, is at a similar moment in its development, a moment all writers (and other content producers) must struggle through until they form a key component of their wills that says never give up.

I find it interesting that as soon as negativity about the economy set in, especially among those tech bloggers who thrive on bubbles and print journalists suddenly out of a decent-paying job who are forced to turn to blogging or dry cleaning, the negativity surrounding blogging also set in. Not enough money. Too many haters. A waste of time and energy. All hype no delivery. A cause of undue stress, obesity, and myocardial infarction. These were the same people, back when that bubble was still good and cozy, once so jazzed about The Secret, this century’s remake of Norman Vincent Peele’s The Power of Positive Thinking.

True, the average blogger pulls in a mere $5,000-$6,000 per year, and that average is obscenely skewed by the top one percent of bloggers pulling more than $200,000. True, there are more abandoned blogs than active ones. True, content in a world that values cheap, short, and easy has been reduced to embarrassing values (I saw one ad on craigslist offering $1.50 per “article”). True, there is worldwide competition for diffused and dwindling ad dollars. True, there has been a deluge of marketers, spammers, and professional bloggers (a.k.a. writers) and “mainstream” media types pushing out the wild and wooly (and unreliable and piggybacking and libelous) amateur, citizen journalists. True, viewers, readers, and fans can be nasty.

Welcome to the media business.

The good stuff lasts, the chaff separates from the wheat, the cream rises to the top, all that. The earliest bloggers and the self-sustained content producers may not like the idea that the blogosphere is changing and will require an old law of media: Content is king, but the king answers to his god, the network.

Save for a few shining stars (think, using radio as an example, Howard Stern an Rush Limbaugh and their hundreds of millions) and stellar independent publications, the network is what will save the blogosphere and content producers. It’s always been tough for individuals to make it in media without a network behind them, paying them good (even great) wages to produce, while the network aggregates and sells content and collective audiences to advertisers.

Like it or not, the corporation is going to have to enter the blogosphere, and by irony, will ruin it in order to save it. Luckily, unlike the past, there will be wider avenues via user-generated media for quality content producers, so long as they have the passion and will to walk those avenues. Besides, writers write, bloggers blog, regardless.
 

Amid Drama, Blognation Is Kaput

In short, it’s a total mess.

Sam Sethi, CEO and founder of Blognation blames TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. Arrington, and lots of other people, blame Sam Sethi.

Bad Blood

Sethi worked for Arrington as editor of TechCrunch UK until December of last year. Sethi left TechCrunch on bad terms after he posted a negative review of LeWeb, a French conference. Arrington denies he fired Sethi, but had asked him to delete the review because of a conflict of interest involving a competing TechCrunch conference.

The founding of Blognation was to follow, and so was more bad blood between Sethi and Lee Wilkins, whom many credit with developing the idea for the company. Arrington says Sethi "booted" Wilkins, who lives in Romania, from the project, and that at one point the conversations got so heated between them that Sethi threatened to fly to Romania to "rip [Wilkins'] head off."

Wilkins went on to set up a similar blog network called MyKinda, which launched last month.

Show Me the Money

Earlier this month, Blognation editor Oliver Starr dropped a bombshell full of dirty laundry about his experience with Sethi and Blognation. In a post published both on his personal blog, and at the Blognation site (subsequently deleted), entitled "An Open Letter to Sam Sethi," Starr reports that he and other Blognation writers had not been paid since launch.

Also in the post, which spans 3,000 words and gets more emotional as it goes, Starr alleges Sethi repeatedly lied about forthcoming payment as well as venture capitalist funding. Starr describes Sethi’s behavior as fraudulent, criminal, and even psychotic.

"You made promises that people took to the bank and then you defaulted on them leaving everyone that trusted you to face the consequences," writes Starr. "I am not kidding when I say that there are people on Blognation that probably won’t have a Christmas thanks to believing in you.

"There are people that are going to be late on car payments and there are people that are going to have to think twice before they go to the dentist because they are out some $10, $20 or even $30,000 dollars of income that they were expecting, for which they HAVE A CONTRACT and for which you have an obligation because you told us that you had the money when in fact you never really did!"

A Blognation Editor Dies

Sethi responded in the comments section of a TechCrunch article that Starr had been asked to leave Blognation in November, implying the post was in response to that. Sethi also stated that a round of funding was about to be closed and that everyone would be paid:

"Marc Ochant [sic] and I spoke on Sunday when he blogged about Facebook. Marc along with the other editors are aware of the situation regarding the delays we have had in funding as they are in direct contact with the VC on our “private” backchannel.

"Just for the record EVERY editor has a contract and will be paid in full prior to Christmas."

That post was made on the morning of December 5th. Marc Orchant, whom Sethi says he spoke with Sunday, had a massive heart attack that same morning, and was reportedly unconscious through at least the 5th. Orchant died December 9th.

Though he’d be hard pressed to prove a correlation, Arrington suggests the stresses of nonpayment contributed to Orchant’s heart attack.

Sabotage or Royal Screwup?

Yesterday, Sethi announced that Blognation was kaput and that he would put the network up for auction, but not before accusing Arrington of sabotaging the company for fear of competition. Sethi blames Arrington for scaring off investors by publishing confidential emails and a "leaked" terms sheet from British investment firm Secora three days before signing.

While Sethi admits in the post that he’d lied to Blognation editors, he claims he was forced to because of Arrington’s FUD campaign to keep him from securing funding. The leaked terms sheet, he says, came from his email account and that Scotland Yard would be investigating who accessed it.

At this point, though, it’s rather difficult (nigh impossible) to determine what’s true and what isn’t from Sam Sethi. The Mobile Jones blog, which reported the Blognation shut-down a day before Sethi posted it on his blog, also reported on December 9th, that Sethi had apologized to Oliver Starr, admitted that he hadn’t fired Starr, and that he impersonated one of his blog editors to leave a comment on TechCrunch.

At stake here now would be sheer credibility, and at this point, Sethi’s credit has run out.