There’s a lot of talk about tech IPO candidates lately. Conspicuously missing from those lists is longtime media darling Digg. Reportedly courted by Google in 2008, the five-year-old news aggregator has been elbowed out of the spotlight -- and traffic rankings -- by six-year-old Facebook and three-year-old Twitter.

In other words, Digg has a MySpace problem.

Unlike MySpace, however, Digg has no plans to passively watch its audience go elsewhere. It may have lost some of its first-mover mojo, but the San Francisco-based company -- which has 40 million registered users -- is actively working to get it back.

For starters, Digg is planning to launch a spate of new Digg sites centered around niche content. To continue broadening away from its original base of men ages 18 to 34, Digg is “extending beyond our one-size-fits-all home page and atomizing content,” says Digg's chief stategy officer, Mike Maser. If you’re interested in rock climbing or knitting, Digg aims to have in-depth news for you to vote up or down on a separate home page.

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We have a new contender for most scandalous private equity exec of the year. And, for bonus points, this one also happens to be a peHUB Wire reader.

The NY Daily News reports that Giri Sekhar, a managing partner with FA Technology Ventures, has been indicted for trying to blackmail the chief counsel of NY State Comtroller Thomas DiNapoli, in order to secure a $25 million fund commitment from NY Common Retirement Fund.

Specifically, Sekhar is alleged to have sent messages threatening to expose the chief counsel’s extramarital affair (which, for the record, DiNapoli’s office denies having occurred).

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* Private equity's new princelings

* Bo Peabody: Facebook and Twitter will always be crappy businesses

* Matthew DeBord agrees that the Tesla IPO is all about hype, but says the company will "eventually define itself as a carmaker to be reckoned with."

* Morning Call: U.S. futures point lower, London rises early, European shares gain, the Nikkei jumps 1.6% and China shares slip.

* Chris Anderson: In the next industrial revolution, atoms are the new bits.

* Wells Fago: Employment growth is just around the corner

* The global carbon market could grow by 33% this year

* Kef Kasdin of Battelle Ventures, on taking cleantech projects from the lab to the marketplace.

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More than 400 peHUB readers took over Connolly's on 45th Street in Manhattan last night, for our first peHUB Shindig of 2010. No content, just cocktails and conversation. Plus, more than $4,500 raised for Doctors Without Borders.

Great to see so many of you there, and sorry we'd been gone for so long (our last NYC event was in Nov. '08). Next time we promise to find a larger room, so that we can fit the other 300 or so of you who got stranded on the wait-list.

Get photos from the event, after the jump...

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In 2001, the New York Times characterized Ron Conway as “just another dot-com also-ran,” owing to the then-poor performance of two Internet index funds that Conway ran for rich contacts who wanted a piece of his early-stage action.

The uber angel was restored to his place at the center of the digital revolution when Google — which he’d backed in 2000 — went public in 2004. The search giant’s IPO made Conway and his investors far richer than when they’d started together. By then, however, Conway had taken enough slings and arrows; he resolved to invest his own money exclusively.
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