I’ve heard from two sources close to the Digg CEO search that there were a glut of good candidates. That’s something companies always say, and I frankly found it hard to believe.

I don’t necessarily mean that as a knock on Digg. I was surprised there were a ton of “great” CEO candidates to run any company in the unsexy critical-mass-but-not-flavor-of-the-month category—period.

Both sources told me the same thing: The existence of a secondary market means that top talent is churning through startups faster than ever. While Digg’s eventual hire was Matt Williams formerly of old-man-of-the-Internet Amazon, sources told me that potential candidates were also coming from hot, pre-IPO Web darlings.

I’ve asked around and had a few entrepreneurs and VCs confirm the trend: The secondary market is upping the talent churn to levels not seen in the Valley since the late 1990s. Then, it was because companies were being started and going public within 18 months. Now it’s because a new Wild West asset class of secondary private stock trades are having a similar effect—with everyone in Silicon Valley’s new favorite substitute for the IPO.

I was particularly surprised to hear some entrepreneurs and VCs say they are getting senior management candidates from Zynga. Zynga?! Isn’t Zynga still newly hot enough to be the one doing the poaching? It bears noting that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is a hard-driving entrepreneur, and some of those looking for other jobs may not be exactly missed, just as the revolving management door in the early days of Facebook wasn’t necessarily, shall we say, unwelcome.

Still, assuming this as widespread as I’m hearing, is this a good thing or a bad thing for the Valley? It depends on what you do here. If you’re looking to climb the corporate startup ladder, it’s great because you can respectably job hop and still cash out at a faster rate. If you’re good, or at least able to make people think you are good, you move up with each hop. But if you’re looking to build a company, the trend is brutal because the talent is churning too fast to, well, actually build a real company.

At a high level, there’s an argument that it makes the Valley’s greater ecosystem more mercenary and one that it makes it less mercenary. It’s more mercenary because startups attract more people who want a quick equity flip. Remember the scourge of blue-shirts-and-khakis in the late 1990s? No one wants that back, except maybe the Bubble Lounge. On the flipside (pun intended), at least the mercenaries have a way to get out—meaning those who stick around are those who care about the mission. And we’re not talking about an immediate flip—this new reality only holds for the companies hot enough to have a secondary market for their shares or a big deal like those being done by Elevation and DST. It’s by any measure, still a pretty contained scourge compared to 1999. But it’s also one that by its very definition includes the companies startups are most likely to want to poach from.

But one thing it does for sure is cement the Valley as the place to start a consumer Web company. It is apparently easier than ever to assemble a team if the hype, valuation and idea are right.

The man at the centre of cricket betting scam allegations about the Pakistan team has been bailed without charge, police say.

Police question a man over an alleged cricket betting scam during the current Pakistan-England Test, with claims Pakistan players were paid to bowl “no balls”.

While not the biggest Microsoft-related lawsuit news of the day, Microsoft just announced that it wants to take its patent infringement case against XML purveyor i4i to the highest level, seeking review by US Supreme Court.

Last May, a federal court of appeals upheld the decision of a lower court that Microsoft had in fact infringed i4i’s XML patent (’449), by introducing Microsoft WORD in 2003 and continuing the XML editing capabilities through 2007. Microsoft was ordered to pay i4i $290 million dollars in fees and change the disputed version of Word.

i4i CEO Loudon Owen responded to Microsoft’s petition for a writ of certiorari, “This next step of filing a petition was anticipated — indeed, proclaimed for months by Microsoft. We continue to be confident that i4i will prevail.”

The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether it will review the case.

Remember Diaspora? You’ll be forgiven if you don’t. Since they received a lot of hype as the open-source “Facebook Alternative” this past May, they’ve been quiet. In fact, they hadn’t given any updates on their progress since early July. But today they’ve re-emerged with some updates. Notably, they say: “We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.” That’s just three weeks away.

That’s good news. But even though it has only been three months since the initial buzz began about the project, the online world has slightly changed. Back then, it seemed as if everyone with a voice on the web was screaming bloody murder about Facebook and their privacy issues. That plus a timely New York Times profile helped Diaspora raise over $200,000 from the crowd-sourced fundraising site Kickstarter — the most ever raised on the site and an amazing $190,000 more than Diaspora’s original goal. But today, again, just three months later, Facebook is still growing like a weed. Controversy keeps bubbling up, but it just as quickly subsides.

We all forgot to quit.

And so the question remains: will a project like Diaspora be able to get any traction given Facebook’s 500 million person head start?

At the very least, Diaspora is being realistic about what they can and cannot do. In the post today they’ve noted that they have for now scrapped the idea of plugins and APIs in favor of “simple and high value features.” I like the sound of that.

Further, they write:

We are spending a good chunk of time concentrating on building clear, contextual sharing. That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies. We know that’s a hard UI problem and we take it seriously.

And while the open-sourcing of the project begins on September 15, they won’t be done working on it. Two of the members of the core four-person team are taking a leave from their studies at NYU (this was a Summer project for all of them) and the work will continue long-term.

Meanwhile, the team notes that it is time for some R&R, as three of them will be attending the Burning Man festival in California. Presumably those pictures will only be shared with their “drinking buddies” list in Diaspora.

Remember Diaspora? You’ll be forgiven if you don’t. Since they received a lot of hype as the open-source “Facebook Alternative” this past May, they’ve been quiet. In fact, they hadn’t given any updates on their progress since early July. But today they’ve re-emerged with some updates. Notably, they say: “We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.” That’s just three weeks away.

That’s good news. But even though it has only been three months since the initial buzz began about the project, the online world has slightly changed. Back then, it seemed as if everyone with a voice on the web was screaming bloody murder about Facebook and their privacy issues. That plus a timely New York Times profile helped Diaspora raise over $200,000 from the crowd-sourced fundraising site Kickstarter — the most ever raised on the site and an amazing $190,000 more than Diaspora’s original goal. But today, again, just three months later, Facebook is still growing like a weed. Controversy keeps bubbling up, but it just as quickly subsides.

We all forgot to quit.

And so the question remains: will a project like Diaspora be able to get any traction given Facebook’s 500 million person head start?

At the very least, Diaspora is being realistic about what they can and cannot do. In the post today they’ve noted that they have for now scrapped the idea of plugins and APIs in favor of “simple and high value features.” I like the sound of that.

Further, they write:

We are spending a good chunk of time concentrating on building clear, contextual sharing. That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies. We know that’s a hard UI problem and we take it seriously.

And while the open-sourcing of the project begins on September 15, they won’t be done working on it. Two of the members of the core four-person team are taking a leave from their studies at NYU (this was a Summer project for all of them) and the work will continue long-term.

Meanwhile, the team notes that it is time for some R&R, as three of them will be attending the Burning Man festival in California. Presumably those pictures will only be shared with their “drinking buddies” list in Diaspora.

If you’ve been on the new Digg at all in the past day or so you’re probably already familiar with the above “Fail Ox” image, especially if you’re trying to use Digg search. The image is new, and is the result of Digg designer Tyson Rosage‘s obsession with the old school computer game The Oregon Trail.

Digg’s Kevin Rose told TechCrunch and Twitter last night that Digg experienced over 1 million unique visits on its launch day (the site has been averaging about 8.7 million unique visits per month, according to Comscore) as well as “a handful of new bugs.”

“We hope to have all the major issues fixed in the next 24hrs,” says Rose, which might affect the ubiquity of the “404″ page. Consensus among users I’ve talked to is that the site seems to be moving forward from the scaling issues it had yesterday both in terms of speed and in terms of frequency of “Fail Oxen.”

Hey, having a twee “something is broken” image seems to have worked out for Twitter.

If you’ve been on the new Digg at all in the past day or so you’re probably already familiar with the above “Fail Ox” image, especially if you’re trying to use Digg search. The image is new, and is the result of Digg designer Tyson Rosage‘s obsession with the old school computer game The Oregon Trail.

Digg’s Kevin Rose told TechCrunch and Twitter last night that Digg experienced over 1 million unique visits on its launch day (the site has been averaging about 8.7 million unique visits per month, according to Comscore) as well as “a handful of new bugs.”

“We hope to have all the major issues fixed in the next 24hrs,” says Rose, which might affect the ubiquity of the “404″ page. Consensus among users I’ve talked to is that the site seems to be moving forward from the scaling issues it had yesterday both in terms of speed and in terms of frequency of “Fail Oxen.”

Hey, having a twee “something is broken” image seems to have worked out for Twitter.