Week in review: The Digg backlash and Apple’s new TV

Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories we published in the last seven days:

Reddit ‘excited’ about chance to eat Digg’s lunch — Could social news aggregator Reddit catch up to its more established competitor, Digg? It may already have.

Digg freezes manual story submissions as user anger mounts — As Digg wrestled with backlash from a recent site redesign, it prevented individual users and publishers alike from manually submitting new content for a few hours on Monday.

Digg’s top user warned of possible backlash months ago — “They absolutely knew it was an issue,” says Andy Sorcini, aka MrBabyMan.

Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad — Author Neal Stephenson has been credited for inspiring today’s virtual world startups with his novel Snow Crash. Now he’s launching a startup himself: Subutai, where he is co-founder and chairman.

Apple TV is the one you date, Google TV is the one you marry — After months of speculation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs finally revealed the new and improved Apple TV. VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar was disappointed.

And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Twitter: 300,000 apps, but none of them matter — Twitter CEO Ev Williams posted a blog entry Thursday with an update on the microblogging service’s usage, which continues to grow sharply. More interesting than the numbers, though, was the message written between the lines: Twitter now has 145 million monthly users, and for the marketers who want to reach them, Twitter is the only way to go.

Review: StarCraft II will keep PC gamers busy for months — VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi gave the revival of the popular strategy game franchise the highest rating he has given to any game this year.

Facebook moves in on Twitter’s turf with new follow feature — Facebook confirmed this week that it has begun testing a new “subscribe” feature for users and pages.

Bootstrapping band of brothers raise $30M for people search engine Inflection — Brian and Matthew Monahan weren’t quite sure how to raise venture capital funding, so they built Inflection from scratch and made it profitable with its first website for searching public records. Now, they seem to have a pretty good fix on it: Inflection announced it has raised $30 million in its first round of funding.

Nissan limits its initial Leaf rollout to 200 cars in five states — Nissan is taking orders for the Leaf, the first mass-produced, all-electric vehicle, but it’s only offering up 200 cars for December delivery.