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A new Y Combinator funded startup called GraffitiGeo has just launched with a fresh spin on user-generated reviews. The mobile application is somewhat like a mashup of review site YelpYelp, mobile social network FoursquareFoursquare, and social news site DiggDigg. The Digg-like element of the application is the easiest piece to use: like that restaurant? Vote it up. You can also leave more detailed comments to go along with your vote, if you so choose. To encourage people to participate in the “game” aspect to the app, GraffitiGeo also introduces a point system whose concept is borrowed from mobile app Foursquare…but is a bit more confusing. What’s more interesting than the mobile application launching now is the second GraffitiGeo app which is right around the corner. The next app will be an augmented reality application for the iPhone which takes the above elements and layers them over your iPhone’s viewfinder… Read on at readwriteweb.com

DiggDigg’s been busy lately adding new features—some loved, some not—but they seem to be having a positive effect on overall. In June, comScore estimates the site brought in 8.8 million unique visitors in the U.S alone, up 31 percent over the preceding three months. That accounts for the change all of a sudden? Well, by Digg’s own admission, once it introduced the Diggbar it saw an initial lift in visitors just as a result of people passing around short links. And it’s been getting even more aggressive on that front lately, having to reverse itself at times. But it’s not just the Diggbar. The site launched a decent search feature in April (which always helps generate more traffic) and Facebook Connect in May… Read on at TechCrunch.com

In today’s blog post by Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser, DiggDigg announced that it will be rolling out its beta ad program later this week. In addition to the community’s existing banner ads, the company is launching an initial set of ads to appear in rotation with regular content. From here, users will interact with the ads in the same way they interact with articles – by digging, burying and commenting on them. Advertising with a high number of Diggs will fetch lower ad revenue and buried advertisers will be charged more. ReadWriteWeb covered Kevin Rose’s suggestion for this advertising system in April. The program will be launched this week for testing to a select few users before making a public release… Read on at ReadWriteWeb.com

According to news posted this morning to API-tracking web site ProgrammableWeb, the social news community at DiggDigg.com may be on the verge of opening up. In a recent message shared on the Digg mailing list, developer Jeff Hodson announced that the forthcoming Digg API will allow people to “not only read data, but also contribute data, too.” In other words, a Read/Write API. The implications of this decision are huge. Where before Digg was the place to find and share interesting links from around the web, that role has, as of late, been taken on by microblogging site TwitterTwitter.com. To combat Twitter’s threat, Digg has tried new launching new features like the DiggBar and their own URL-shortening service, but nothing they’ve done so far could have as big of an impact on their future as the new API… Read on at ReadWriteWeb.com

How do you measure the value of a visitor to your website? If the visitor is there to watch video, perhaps the most useful metric is the amount of time they spend viewing it before navigating elsewhere. As it turns out, users who visit videos from TwitterTwitter links actually spend the most time watching them, as compared to visitors referred by FacebookFacebook or DiggDigg. According to a study by TubeMogul, Twitter users view a video for 1 minute, 58 seconds on average, versus averages of 1:14 and 0:58 for Facebook and Digg, respectively. Read on at Mashable…