Giga Omni Media has secured another $4.5 million in funding, bringing the total to $5.3 million according to Michael Arrington, who disagrees with the decision to raise money at all. Om Malik writes:

We are going to use this new investment prudently, to enhance our technology platform and content offerings, add to our current portfolio of publications and expand our Events and Briefings businesses. We are in investing for the long-term — in ourselves.

This move shows that Giga Omni Media will continue to expand aggressively, and further acquisitions, following the ones of jkOnTheRun and The Apple Blog, is likely.

Digg has raised $28.7 million in Series C funding, which means bigger offices, a bunch of new job openings, and a more aggressive expansion. The latter will include international support, since almost half of Digg’s user hail from outside the US. This means localized versions, starting to appear in early 2009. My guess is that German, Spanish, and French versions are prioritized, for obvious reasons.

Om Malik reports a rumor that founder Kevin Rose got a chance to cash in, and took it:

The rumor I heard is that Digg founder Kevin Rose got to a sell a nice chunk of his shares in the company, a trend that has become quite fashionable among the Web 2.0 set. Several founders have taken money off the table as their companies wait for a bigger payday.

Good for Rose, of course, an probably not something to be upset about. I’d be more worried about the fact that 1% of the users generates 32% of the visits (stats from GigaOM). What happens if/when they get bored with Digg? That Facebook partnership might be crucial, but it might also prove just how hard it is to move from the tech savvy crowd, to the mainstream. And the former usually abandon ship when the latter gets in on the action. Digg is in for a bumpy ride.

Six months ago, a group of venture capitalist companies set up the iFund to promote and fund application development for Apple’s iPhone.

Now, they’ve set up the iFundVC blog, which will be used to keep the public updated on where the $100m is being invested.

There’s only one blog entry at present, and it will be interesting to see how much the site is developed. Particularly as some elements of the funding process are sure to be confidential, I wonder how much is left to talk about.

The design of the blog is certainly basic, but if pushes out interesting information then I don’t really care.

(Via TUAW)

Brian Alvey, the co-founder of blog network Weblogs, Inc. (along with Jason Calacanis), announced earlier this week that his new startup, CrowdFusion, has received funding from venture capital firm Velocity Interactive Group.

Brian writes:

Here are some more details on the funding:

* Our valuation was “somewhere south of Facebook’s”.
* Because Crowd Fusion didn’t exist when Jon Miller left AOL, Time Warner’s non-compete couldn’t block him from joining our board.

But seriously, there is some confusion as to whether Crowd Fusion is a publishing company or a platform company. I’ll have to do another post to clear that up better, but for now just know that we’re a publishing company with our own platform and both are named Crowd Fusion. Did that help?

Crowd Fusion markets itself currently as a “Web Publishing System built to solve the pain points of publishers at scale”. The startup also includes Judith Meskill, another Weblogs, Inc. veteran, as Chief Operating Officer, along side Brian Alvey as CEO.

Podcasting service BlogTalkRadio have secured $4.6 million in Series A funding, which sparked a piece in the Bits blog, and an announcement post in the official blog of course:

We simply couldn’t be more excited about how this company is evolving and now we have the capital in place to accomplish many things. We are planning major enhancements to our user interface and user experience. We will invest in content and distribution as well as further developing our ad sales platform. We are also looking at developing many new products including a highly differentiated video platform, audio to text transcription applications and much more.

Congratulations are in order. Now let’s see what they’ll do with the dough.