In a blog post this morning by Kevin Rose, it appears as though Digg has cut roughly 10% of their staff. Layoffs have been made to around 12 employees, and it was difficult on the entire staff to part with many members.

Digg has done nothing but grow over the past few months, so it’s surprising to see a reduction in their team. It seems as though there are still many engineering positions open for the platform, and Digg, Inc. is actively still interested in hiring for jobs.

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The transformation from the blogging era has already begun, as more and more people are learning how to start up their own online press. Now dubbed by many as online magazines, running your own personal blog isn’t hard these days. Finding writers and getting a design together is the hardest part, and once you’re set you can jump right in to launch your magazine venture!

I’ve recently been visiting Social Media Examiner quite a bit. From what I can tell the magazine holds a lot of promise, already holding a solid 20k+ feed subscribers and having most articles hit in the hundreds of ReTweets.

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When Kevin Rose resumed CEO at Digg, his first act was to remove the Diggbar from submitted stories. This was, as most of us know, just a bad idea in general and was looking at Digg too much as a business and not like the social network and community it is.

Well announced today by Keval Desai on Digg’s Blog, they will be killing the short URL service for any stories not already submitted to Digg. You will be able to still share the short URL’s from stories through Digg’s share feature, ReTweet button, etc. However the URL will lead to the Digg story page most likely, as the Digg Bar is being revoked.

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Popular social news site Mixx has launched a new YourMixx homepage. The YourMixx section is a customized portion of your homepage which is displayed as soon as you log into the site. It’s different from the front page of other sites such as Digg, as it is customized for each users preferences.

The Mixx Staff has released a new blog post mentioning some of the new updates. To me it sounds very exciting, the staff at Mixx are really trying to listen to what the users have to say, and are working from that angle to fix any issues wrong with the YourMixx homepage.

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With the rise of social news sites, finding new content aggregation methods are pretty simple. And with how quickly the web is growing today, it’s simple to find micro-niche sites for just about anything. DotNetKicks is one of my personal favorite sites – similar do DZone, but only for .NET and ASP programming links.

I’ve been visiting the site for a while and have been a part of the community for a few months. However a mass e-mail has been sent out to all the site’s users announcing a new update they’ve done to the design. I’ll agree with their statements – the design looks very, very good!

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There are plenty of social news and media outlets today used for sharing and promoting articles. Especially once we break down website’s into niches and focus on the web design and graphics tutorials portion, we’ve got plenty of sites. However there appears to be a new launch for a Drigg-powered social news site, WebDev5.

The site’s design is sturdy and everything runs very smooth on the site. Just by checking out how the XHTML/CSS and JavaScript work together you can tell it’s not based on the popular Pligg CMS, but of course Drigg is an alternative which runs very nicely for a Digg-clone site.

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You don’t find many great social news websites these days. You know, the kind that let you vote on stories and the most popular hit the front page? Digg and Reddit are still pretty good, and there are a few nice Pligg sites out there but overall not too many.

Well a few months ago I ran into an amazing site, Tip’d.com. Based on the Pligg CMS, it runs similar to Digg but for social news on finances. Average front-page stories hit anywhere from 10-14 votes, which shows just how active the community really is.

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