Condé Nast has spun out Reddit as an independent company, though its parent company still owns it all. On the Reddit blog, Erik Martin writes, “This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can better handle future …

Digg has launched a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends. The feature will promote "certain highly active stories" as they are trending, not unlike Twitter’s trending topics.

The feature could give stories a better chance of getting more exposure when they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily made it to the front page. Digg’s Kurt Wilms explains:

Compete puts together a monthly ranking of the top 250 Web sites in the US, based on unique visitors, and breaks up the data by relevant categories and behavioral segments. In its latest report, Compete found that the top performers for July fell into four main categories: auto manufacturers that were part of the "Cash for Clunkers" deal, summer blockbuster movie sites, back-to-school shopping sites and social media news aggregates (like Digg or Tweetmeme).