Digg gets more political; USA Today disowns readers; Wordpress supports OpenID

The social web weekly: a quick-fire roundup of some of the news, announcements and conversations that have occurred throughout the week…

• Digg gets more political. Not sure how I missed this, but the social news site, Digg, has added a new section dedicated to stories covering the 08 US presidential election. There was clearly a lot of demand for such a move, as Digg has already become a somewhat skewed battleground for the presidential nominations.
• USA Today disowns readers. Earlier this week I reported on how the USA Today newspaper had revamped its website to incorporate a number of social networking features, including reader blogs. While I generally welcome the move by USA Today to invite its readership to contribute content -- particularly through commenting on stories -- it seems that the powers above at the paper, don't. VentureBeat reports that "the new content of all these users won’t be tracked by Google or found in Google’s search results, because USA today has used Javascript technology to defy it." Asked why the paper doesn't want to be associated with its readers' contributions (at least where search engines are concerned), Steve Kurtz, director of IT at USA Today replied: "We’re still a newspaper." Right then, so they're not becoming a social network after all. Phew.
• Wordpress supports OpenID (sort of). Wordpress.com is the latest company to add support for OpenID, the distributed single sign-in system. Any Wordpress.com account can now act as a user's OpenID, meaning that the popular blogging platform has become an OpenID provider. It won't, however, work the other way round. So no starting a new Wordpress.com blog using an existing OpenID account hosted elsewhere. It's still another sign of the wave of support for the standard, meaning that 2007 could well be the year of 'single sign-in'. Yay!
  

One more thing... (tagged: humor)

• Viacom Demands YouTube Pull 400,000 Ex-TV Viewers From Its Site. (From the Onion)

In a cease-and-desist letter sent to Google's attorneys last week, media conglomerate Viacom demanded that YouTube immediately pull 400,000 ex-TV viewers from its industry-leading video-sharing site. "These viewers clearly belong to Viacom and its related entertainment subsidiaries," stated the letter...

Well it is nearly the weekend :)