Hey everyone,

We’re excited to announce our next Digg Dialogg guest, technology luminary Marissa Mayer from Google. Marissa joined Google as their first female engineer in 1999 and was among the first 20 employees. She is currently their Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and has been responsible for leading & developing products including Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth and iGoogle. Fortune magazine recently named Marissa as one of the 50 most powerful women in the world.

From now until Friday, July24th at 12:00pm PDT, you can submit & Digg questions that you’d like to hear answered. Kevin will be conducting the interview, and with the recent buzz about the launch of the new Google Chrome OS, we think this should be a great discussion.

In case you’ve missed previous Digg Dialoggs, you have the opportunity to submit and Digg questions that we then pose to influential leaders and luminaries. Check out some of the past ones on the page, including Al Gore, Trent Reznor, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Branson.

Submit and vote on your favorite questions on the Digg Dialogg page from now until Friday at Noon PDT; we’ll be posting the full interview on Wednesday, July 29th at Noon PDT.

Thanks!
Jay

Hey everyone,

I wanted to clear up some confusion created over the past couple of days surrounding the DiggBar, specifically how Digg short URLs work. As we’ve stated in the past, the DiggBar is meant to streamline the Digg experience and provide our registered users with the opportunity to catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content. Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service.

Last week, we made a change that began directing non-logged in traffic generated from Digg short URLs to Digg story pages where they can view the comments and related content. In response to feedback, all short URLs that were generated *before* today will now behave as they did prior to last week’s change by taking the user directly to the source content. Logged-in Digg users will continue to be directed to the source content with the DiggBar (if they have it turned on). Of course, if the content has never been submitted to Digg, viewers will continue to be sent directly to the source.

As always, keep the feedback coming as we continue to think about ways to enhance the user experience and evolve the product.

Thanks,
Jay

Hey everyone,

Some exciting news here at Digg today. I’m thrilled to welcome Chas Edwards to Digg as our Chief Revenue Officer. Chas will oversee all current and future revenue generation activity for the company. Chas is known in the industry and his experience is perfect for us at this stage of our growth.

As you may know, we’ve been very focused on building an internal sales organization at Digg as part of our monetization strategy. Over the past several months, we’ve assembled a very talented direct sales team that will continue to be led by Tom Shin. Tom’s team has hit the ground running with much success and I believe that Chas will be a great addition. Tom Shin will report to Chas and the two will work closely together on Digg’s sales and advertising strategy. In addition, Chas will focus on creating new revenue streams for the company including sponsorships, new advertising programs and channels as well as help to manage our continued relationship with Microsoft.

Chas comes to Digg from Federated Media (FM) where he, together with John Battelle, co-founded and built an incredibly successful media publishing company over the past four years. Prior to FM, Chas held various sales and marketing roles at CNET and Tech TV (a company near and dear to our hearts).

Chas will be transitioning his role at FM over the next few weeks and officially joins Digg on June 22nd. We’re all very excited to have Chas on board and look forward to leveraging his expertise to continue to create an innovative and unique Digg experience for all of you.

Thanks,

-Jay

Hey everyone –

Following the excitement of our last Digg Dialogg with Richard Branson, including the infamous fist fight challenge with Stephen Colbert, we are looking forward to mixing it up a bit. Join us for our next Digg Dialogg where we ask Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the top questions from the Digg Community.

Ask and vote on questions for Gov. Schwarzenegger…

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a world-famous athlete and actor, and most recently, California’s 38th Governor. His notable accomplishments as Governor include the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a bipartisan agreement to combat global warming. He is also a successful businessman and commits his time to charitable organizations, including the Special Olympics.

For those of you who’ve missed previous interviews, Digg Dialogg gives the community an opportunity to submit and vote up questions posed to influential leaders, change agents and luminaries. Check out previous Digg Dialogg episodes with Nancy Pelosi, Trent Reznor, Al Gore, John Boehner and Sir Richard Branson.

Governor Schwarzenegger should provide an interesting perspective on the economy of Silicon Valley, Proposition 8, the environment, and the upcoming California Gubernatorial race. So be sure to submit and vote for your favorite questions from now until Tuesday, May 26th at 12:00pm PDT on the Digg Dialogg page.

We’ll be asking Governor Schwarzenegger your most popular questions next week. We will also post regular updates to the homepage and the Digg Twitter account to let you know when it’s live.

We’ll be announcing more guests soon. As always, let us know who you’d like to talk to by adding suggestions in the comments.

Thanks,
Jay

Hey Everyone,

It’s that time again. We’re hosting our next virtual Digg Townhall on Tuesday, May 19th at 5pm PT/8pm ET. It’s been an incredibly busy quarter full of activity here at Digg. We’re looking forward to taking your questions and sharing Digg updates. So please submit and Digg up the questions that you’d like us to address. Kevin and I will respond to the most popular ones live via webcast on the Townhall page. The recorded video will be posted shortly after.

We’re looking forward to talking with you all soon!

Thanks,
Jay

Hey all,

Wanted to reach out to folks with an update on Digg and our priorities for 2009 as well as address some of the recent speculation about our business.

As we’ve often stated over the past couple of months, given the current economic climate, we’ve made the decision to take a more conservative approach to our expansion plans and aggressively focus on reaching profitability within the year.

This means we’ll be taking proactive measures to manage our costs including a headcount reduction in certain areas that are less core to this year’s objectives while continuing to hire for roles that will help build on our leadership position and get us to profitability faster. This includes hiring a direct sales team, in addition to other targeted hires in 2009.

As part of our aggressive path to profitability within the year, I also wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the major priorities for the company:

• Rolling out new features to grow and engage our community
• Building on our advertising infrastructure
• Building on our successful partnership with Microsoft
• Ongoing sponsorship opportunities
• Ongoing publisher and trade partnerships

I’m confident that with commitment and focus on these priorities, Digg will be an even stronger company in 2009 and will continue to create innovative features for our more than 35 million community members. I want to thank you all for your continued support and commitment – helping us achieve our vision of the democratization of media, and revolutionizing the way people consume and discover information online.

Thanks,

Jay

Hey All,

Last week, former Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore was our second Digg Dialogg guest. For those of you who didn’t catch the program on Current TV this weekend, you can watch it online here and at Current. The Digg community submitted over 1,000 questions, ranging topics from the election to Al Gore’s Twitter account. We’ve included a quick highlight below (the full version is available at the links above).

Last week’s election was definitely one of historic proportions and many folks joined us for the Election Night party, hosted by Digg and Current. It was Digg’s highest traffic day in history and a historic day for democratized media. I want to personally thank all of you for helping Digg and the community be part of such a memorable presidential election.

Thanks,

-Jay

Hey All —

Today is a big day for Digg. 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.

You’ve given us some great feedback on how we can make Digg better. As you’ve heard us say many times before, we feel that we’ve only implemented a fraction of the vision for what we believe Digg can achieve. The new features that will be a part of this program will incorporate much of your feedback, including personalizing the Digg experience, enhancing the recommendation system across other areas of the site, creating deeper category and topic content views and more ways to discover and organize content.

Of Digg’s over 30 million unique monthly users, almost half are from outside of the U.S., so this expansion will also include initiatives aimed at making Digg more relevant to local tastes, including local languages. We will begin laying the groundwork for that immediately with the beginning of our international growth strategy in early 2009.

Other initiatives will focus on expanding our community outreach programs and developing more sophisticated tools and interfaces for publishers.

To help support all of this, we will be significantly growing the size of the Digg team in the next year and moving to larger San Francisco offices that give us the room we need to do it. We’re hiring, so check out our jobs page. Fueling the acceleration of all of these programs is our revenue success to date, along with a new $28.7 million round in funding, led by Highland Capital Partners.

Thanks again to all of you for your support in making Digg the vibrant community that it is today.

Digg on,
Jay

Hey all-

The politics section of Digg took off and has grown faster than almost any other content area on the site. Since then, we’ve added new categories for political opinion, political news and the 2008 U.S. elections. And, last fall we launched Digg the Candidates as another way to discover news on Digg and to follow content on the candidates and see what they are Digging.

As the U.S. election season hits full swing, we’re bringing this momentum to the upcoming political party conventions in Denver and St. Paul.

Next week at the Democratic National Convention, Digg, along with Google, local organizations, national blogs and others, will be sponsoring the first ever new media center at a major political party convention. The Big Tent will be a place for bloggers, new media journalists and the public to record their experiences from the convention and to hear from top newsmakers on the Digg Stage.

We’re also hosting our first live Townhall direct from The Big Tent on Thursday, August 28th at 4:30 EST/ 1:30 PST. We’ll be sending out a call for questions on the blog shortly.

The following week, we will be at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. We’ve teamed up with MySpace, Rock the Vote and others to sponsor an event with the Impact Film Festival, which is celebrating the power of film to educate people on critical issues facing the world. We’ll be giving away a few free tickets, so be sure to subscribe to our Twitter feed for a chance to attend if you’re in town.

We’ll be taking videos and snapshots from both of the conventions and posting them on Digg, so you can follow all of the activity.

Thanks to all of you for your support in making Digg a great place for the best online content, whatever content you’re into.

Jay

Hey all! Thanks for tuning in to our Digg Townhall on Tuesday night. Keep the feedback coming! If you missed it, you can catch the past Townhalls at digg.com/townhall.

Be sure to mark your calendar for a few upcoming events — Digg is coming to The Big Apple for Internet Week and we’re teaming up with Revision3 to throw a Digg Meet-up and live Diggnation on June 4th. Join us at Studio B in Brooklyn from 6pm-midnight to meet fellow Diggers and folks from the Digg team. There will also be a performance by Scam School’s Brian Brushwood, special guests and announcements. For a sneak peek into what to expect, check out some highlights from our first Digg Meet-up in San Francisco, below: