SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0) - There seems to be a pattern here: Website's traffic takes off, Yahoo buys website. Yahoo's rumored acquisition of Digg, a popular news website where readers rate articles, would, if if happens, make it the fourth social-media startup the Internet portal has acquired in less than a year in an effort to compete with Google. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose's non-denial denial : "We are focused on features, not selling the company."

Unprofitable? Great, let's go public!!

Traffic.com, which provides data on highway conditions to broadcasters and others, has never made a dime the old-fashioned way, but it still managed to raise $78.6 million by going public Wednesday. Like Google before it, Traffic.com used a Dutch auction to price its shares at $12. The offering lacked much first-day IPO pop, with shares up only 15 cents, but that's an expected result of the auction process, in which investors name their price and the number of shares they want to buy. And what did investors get for their $12 a share? A company that lost $36.5 million on $32 million in sales in the first nine months of 2005. Clearfish Research rates them "between a Blah and a Dog." Now that's an interesting stock-rating system.

Nintendo DS Lite out in March

Take that, Sony PlayStation Portable! Nintendo will introduce a new version of its handheld gaming system, the DS Lite, in Japan on March 2. The new model is iPod white, 20 percent lighter, and a third smaller, but keeps the DS's two-screen design.

Google censured for censorship

Back in 2004, blogger Philipp Lenssen points out, Google employees claimed that "Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages." With the launch of Google.cn, Google's China-specific search engine, that's no longer the case, Lenssen argues, since Google has admitted to removing search results from its Chinese version.