Yesterday might have been a US holiday, but the Twittering and blogging masses were awakened (by quacking claxons, I'm sure) to the inadvertent leak of Google Chrome, the oft-rumored browser from the search giant. Naturally, everyone wants a piece of the action. Here are a few of the stories we're digesting:

TechCrunch has some juicy first pics of the browser. They snagged a few blurry YouTube screenshots before the demo video was pulled as well. Is "blurry" and YouTube in the same sentence redundant?

Not everyone is enamored with Chrome. Lance Ulanoff at PC Magazine provides tonic to those who think this is a real game-changer. He makes some great points.

At the moment, the Google Chrome comic book page on Blogoscoped is down because the "server is a bit stressed right now." I need 90cc's of Google juice, stat!

If you think Quikboy has something to say about Chrome, you haven't read the thread over on Slashdot. Go ahead, we can wait.

Yes, there's already a Wikipedia page!

Don't forget Mashable's take, our old buddy Marshall Kirkpatrick runs down the top features and Ina Fried (Webware) points out what everyone has been repeating: Redmond, volley off the port bow.

Google News has a little over 1,000 stories on Chrome, all within 24 hours. So who's not interested in this thing?

The read link on this post takes you to our Google Chrome page, and we'll be liveblogging around 2pm to cover the press conference via those who are there. Will September 2 be a watershed day online, or is Google's browser destined to be an also-ran? Leave your thoughts in the comments, as always.

UPDATES:
Chris Messina chimes in, explaining why this is important to Mozilla and the open web at large.
Forgot to include Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who references her awesome interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly.
VC extraordinaire Fred Wilson pulls up a three-legged stool to explain what this means.
Switched has a post about Chrome as well.
Matt Cutts has a liveblog going of the announcement (thanks Ryan!)
Jack Flack deciphers the Googlespeak.
Ryan at CybernetNews asks if Chrome will eat all other browsers for lunch.
OStatic's Mike Gunderloy has a terrific browser scorecard with his predictions on how other browsers will fare after the Chrome hits the fan.

Digg has a problem. What was once a haven of obscure, insightful, and breaking news has become a cesspool of dated headlines, generic brand commentary, and fan-boy-blog spam. What happened? Why do the vast majority of front page links come from "popular" websites who feature a prominent "digg it" button on every article? Is there some conspiracy afloat? Is digg rewarding websites that send them a lot of traffic?

Can we demand a recount?

Sadly no. Digg's problem isn't one of cronyism or corruption, it is far worse. Digg has always been a poorly planned community. There, we said it.

To make matters worse, digg's phenomenal growth illustrates its own failure. If it were a nation, we would call it a failing state with a bumming population. A population easily and unwittingly manipulated by the craftiness of other large and powerful websites.

Need proof?

Of the 15 front page articles this morning:

• 7 were from popular blogs that featured the familiar "digg it" badge
• 5 were from popular sites that featured a prominent submit to digg button
• 2 were from popular mainstream news sites
• 1 was from a small town newspaper.
  

The problem really starts on the upcoming page. Here digg's increasing popularity attracts far more submissions than the diggers on the upcoming page can handle. A random check reveals 34 new links in the last two minutes. In another two minutes those links will be buried on the 4th or 5th page having never received a digg. A visit to page 40 in the upcoming queue reveals only one link that has garnered more than 3 diggs, and that link is from a popular website with the (you guessed it) digg it button at the top of the page.

How could this happen? Have diggers simply stopped caring about their own community?

First Reuters announces that it'll be launching a social news service similar to MySpace. Now it turns out MySpace is rumored to be working on a news service (that probably won't really compete head to head with Reuters).

The upcoming MySpace news venture will allow users to post news clips on their personal pages, share those clips with others, and rate and comment on others' news items. We're guessing you'll find much more entertainment and general interest new on MySpace than on tech-heavy sites like Digg and Slashdot.

MySpace News should launch within the next few months.

[via Webware]

If you've ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg's homepage, you've enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it's certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.

But how valuable is digg traffic, really, and is the digg community one that we should even care about? Unfortunately, after observing the digg community for about a year, I'd have to conclude no, it's not. Now, at this point I should point out that AOL owns Weblogs Inc, who own Download Squad, and AOL also owns Netscape, recently converted into a social news and media voting site that is in many ways similar to digg. So if you don't think I can be objective about this, you might want to just skip this post. But I'm not here to sing the praises of Netscape over digg either. Overall, I'm not certain that social media sites like Netscape, digg, reddit, del.icio.us, or even the granddaddy of them all - Slashdot - will have any relevance whatsoever in five years.

Okay, so now that I've condemned a whole class of website, or really a whole class of online community, I should point out that while digg drives the largest amount of traffic of the bunch, the community at digg is actually rotting from the inside out.

This is a very inflammatory statement to make, but all it takes is to browse through the comments on few random frontpage posts at digg, and you'll see what I mean. The sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming, and makes digg a place that is not only not fun to visit, it's certainly not a place to "share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you", as digg's tagline optimistically claims.

Over at Slashdot they're running an interview with Mozilla VP of Products Chris Beard about Firefox 2. The good thing about Slashdot's interviews is that the questions are chosen by the readers. Coincidentally, that's also the bad thing about Slashdot's interviews, because it means time gets wasted on questions like, "How was the cake from MS?" Anyway, it's not a terrible interview. Beard answers questions on Firefox's rendering speed as compared to IE7's ("we test every nightly build to make sure that we're getting faster, not slower than our previous releases"), standards and compatibility with IE ("We do our best to match IE's behavior. But we also realize that trying to be bug-for-bug compatible with IE is a dead end"), feature bloat ("Our community is surprisingly conservative, and we ask ourselves a lot of tough questions about whether or not a feature is really needed and used by a majority of users before we add it into Firefox."), and more. With Firefox's future growth uncertain in the face of IE7 and Vista, the interview is an interesting read.

Well, this is unexpected. Slashdot has launched a new social bookmarking feature a la del.icio.us. The new system has the requisite tagging, bookmarklet and Popular Bookmarks page, but beyond that it's very rudimentary—there's no way to browse by tags, for instance. Slashdot doesn't seem to be trying to take on del.icio.us, though. According to CmdrTaco, Slashdot Bookmarks "is primarily an extension of our submission bin ... our intent is that this system eventually be used to help us find content for the mainpage." He also says RSS feeds are coming, but just browsing the popular page I've already come upon some interesting links. It will be interesting to see whether Slashdot Bookmarks will take Slashdot in a similar direction to Digg, or if the editorial process will remain more or less unchanged.

Slashdot is running an interview with Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software. Overall it's pretty fluffy, but von Tetzchner does comment on the recent Microsoft acquisition rumors ("I would be disappointed if we were to end up in their hands and I find that very unlikely. I believe a lot of people at Opera would find them selves other work and that would include me."), their recent deal to make Google the default search in Opera, and open source ("I do not think that going open source would make us more efficient.").

For the past couple years a subscription to Slashdot bought you a number of benefits, including being able to see stories 10 or 20 minutes before the non-paying public. This week Slashdot debuted a new feature that lets you watch a short advertisement in exchange for a free "day pass" that will let you see those stories from "The Mysterious Future." The day pass model has worked well for sites like Salon, but will it work for Slashdot?

Here comes the second edition of Slashdot in 60 Seconds - a weekly roundup of all software-related news /. deemed fit for print this week. In case you missed last week's inaugural edition, check it out to get up to speed.

But without further interruption, here's the latest from /. from Saturday Aug. 27th - the morning of Friday Sept. 3rd:

• Accused Zotob Worm Author Says Money Was Motive
Spyware vendors offering commission to worm and virus writers?


• The Massachusetts Office Party
Who's up for tea?


• Google Seeks to Develop Parallel Internet?
Uh, GoogleZon anyone?