Pligg, which is an open source attempt at a Digg-like social networking voting site application is being updated this week for some serious security vulnerabilities.

Everyone knows that Digg is a hugely popular social news website where like-minded folks gather and flame each other to death. But if you're a Digg user and want to flex your coding skills to get a little more from the site, we've got the perfect code project for you: we're going to show you how to write a Python app to read Digg submissions and geo-locate them using GeoIP.

The popular social networking site Facebook just announced a Chinese version, but similar Chinese-based Web sites such as Xiaonei and Hainei have been struggling there. However, since April, UCenter Home, an open source social network service based on PHP and MySQL, is pushing open social networking in China.

Like many multinational corporations, Microsoft has embraced social networking as a means of making customers feel like participants, not just end users, in a Microsoft community.  When it comes to community-building, however, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle against the open-source world, which was built around social networking before it was called social networking.

A liberal blogger has uncovered that a "group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com has just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, up-vote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives."

Acquia have released Drupal Commons 1.0, a complete open source social networking system for quickly deploying a fully functional social networking site

Open Source CMSes are the latest rage it seems, and we've tried out dozens. One that stands out above the rest for small businesses and personal networks is the Elgg open source "social engine," which can be used to create social applications.

Suspicious accounts in Digg.com.

Digg have just signed an exclusive ad deal with Microsoft. A pretty solid business move for them, I would imagine. But it brings another player to the table. A player who doesn’t exactly have a squeaky clean trackrecord when it comes to playing clean with contracts.