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Social news site Digg has raised $28.7 million in a Series C venture round led by Highland Capital Partners, and has in turn announced a major site expansion.

Digg had long been rumored to be up for sale, with buyers from both the media and Silicon Valley sides of the aisle reportedly interested. The company walked away from a $100 million offer from the Al Gore-founded Current Media, which eventually launched an in-house social news service called Current News. News Corp., which acquired MySpace in 2005, has also been mentioned as a potential suitor, and there always seems to be a rumor that Google has wanted to buy Digg.

“Today is a big day for Digg,” CEO Jay Adelson wrote on the company blog. “We’re announcing a major expansion effort–the largest we’ve undergone in our history. With a new round of funding, we’re accelerating many of the programs that we’ve been working on over the past several months, including investments in infrastructure, new feature development, international expansion and hiring all the people we need to get there.”

The site plans to explore geographic expansion options, including translating Digg into languages other than English, and “significantly” expanding the size of its San Francisco work force.

In what will be seen as a media coup, Britain’s Guardian Media Group bought the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

That price includes an earn-out which will depend on future performance of the company. paidContent is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.

With the motto,”The Economics of Content,” paidContent has been a pioneer in the online news space, doing high-quality reporting about online media and digital efforts by big media companies.

ContentNext has offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and Manhattan and operates several other sites, and also runs several conferences. The company had reportedly been raising funding of several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

But ContentNext’s only financial backer so far has been Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which invested an undisclosed amount in 2006.

Longtime digital media exec Larry Kramer is on its board and ContentNext recently hired media exec Nathan Richardson as its CEO. Sources said ContentNext would continue being run independently after the Guardian purchase.

This sale comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica, a much larger tech-focused site, to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million.