At the end of this month Jeffrey Kalmikoff is taking the design helm at Digg as our new director of design and user experience. Jeffrey will be leading all aspects of user experience and interface design at Digg. He’s a stellar designer and leader, who until recently was chief creative officer at Threadless and SkinnyCorp. I’m thrilled to be placing Digg in such good hands as I pursue a new project. I’ll continue to remain very involved with Digg as a frequent advisor and design consultant (and of course as a user!).

In October, I will be joining my friends Cal Henderson and Stewart Butterfield (and several other ex-Flickr folks) building a game under the company name Tiny Speck. Sign up over at TinySpeck.com to learn more. I’m excited to be digging (heh heh) into a fresh project with new and exciting challenges but it’s bittersweet to be stepping away from Digg.

Over the course of the past four and a half years that I’ve been working Digg, it has undergone many changes and we’re extremely grateful to all of you who’ve helped shape the site through your participation, feedback, and passion. I take with me so many great memories and experiences from my time here. We have some great ideas currently under development and I know Jeffrey and his team will infuse them with much awesome.

Jeffrey has very strong experience designing a thriving community-driven website. You are the ones who make Digg tick and I am very confident that Jeffrey will be able to support you with Digg’s design. He’ll be looking for your feedback to design the future of Digg and I’m sure you won’t be shy in offering it to him!

My hat goes off to you, Digg readers, participants, and fans! Please join me in welcoming Jeffrey to the Digg family and thank you for everything. Daniel (Digg, Twitter)

An apology is due – until today, Digg’s search has been pretty terrible. I’m really excited to announce that our search no longer sucks. In fact, I think it’s awfully good but you should try it out and judge for yourself.

Our primary focus is to give you the best possible stories at the top of the results right away. The first thing you’ll notice is an improved user interface but don’t let that fool you, there are significant improvements under the hood. We weight searches on a number of factors including timeliness, Digg counts, keywords, and others.

What’s new?

• A faceted model for filtering results means you can cut your results by factors like Digg count, topic, time, etc. It gives you a lot more information about your query and enables you to drill down to your result much more effectively.

• Advanced shortcuts allow people who are looking for stories with specific promotion characteristics to filter effectively. Add +p to your query for only promoted stories, +u for upcoming stories, and +b for buried.

• Common search tricks – like putting your query in quotes for an exact match and adding a negative sign before the term (i.e., -term) to remove that term from your results – now work.

• A graph showing the relative number of search results by month for the past several years gives some visibility into the trend of a particular query term over time.

• Searching for stories from a particular domain is much more effective. We weight recent domain-related results higher when you type in the full domain. Also, if you want to filter any query by domain, type it into the domain filter in the left column.

• New RSS feeds are much more useful. We’ve always had RSS feeds for searches, but with the new faceting capabilities, this becomes a lot more effective. You could create a feed that gives you stories with over 1000 Diggs about X and Y but never when keyword Z appears… handy!

• Search is faster now too. Not only have we added more functionality to the search, but we’re usually getting your search back to you significantly faster.

This new search will also serve as a foundation for a number of upcoming projects, so we’re happy to have it out in the wild. Go kick the tires and let us know what you think either by clicking the feedback link at the bottom of any search result or in the comments for this post.

As always, stay classy
Daniel

In the next week or so, we’ll be closing down the podcasts section and folding it into the video section of Digg. We’ll also be retiring the old Digg Spy. Both of these features have become outmoded as Digg has grown and as a result they have a very small number of users (under 1,000) each. Podcasts will be rolled into the videos section – a better home for longer form videos. Digg Spy will be retired as we look to implement more exciting new Digg Labs projects in the future.

Recently I’ve been speaking at several design conferences about the necessity for iterative development. One of the key points I’ve been making is that subtraction is an oft-overlooked type of improvement. The retirement of these two features on the Digg site is an example of this principle in practice.

DIGG PODCASTS

The podcasts section experiment started almost two years ago. At the time, podcasts were relatively new and we saw them as a unique medium – different enough from audio or video to warrant a separate and custom-designed section of the site. That section was developed to differentiate between each ‘episode’ and the parent ‘show’, which could be ranked over a long period of time. Unfortunately, as we all learned, the podcasts section stagnated because the top shows dominated and there was little activity. This shortcoming is one reason that the podcasts section is used by less than a thousand people on a regular basis.

Over the past couple of years, we also saw a rise in the submission of episodic videos in the main sections of Digg under the ‘video’ media type. Television shows, individual podcast episodes, and clips from shows were frequently intermixed in the main Digg river. This type of natural activity, which can compared to the idea of desire paths, is a pretty strong indication that ‘videos’ is a better home for podcast-type material. By eliminating the awkward differentiation of podcasts, we’ll be greatly simplifying Digg from a user standpoint.

DIGG SPY

The original Digg Spy is being retired for different reasons. We built Digg Spy in the very early days of Digg, when the activity level was less frenetic than it is today and we could show a lot of the action through a live activity stream. It was great. You could discover new content and new people in a visual way that AJAX was just then letting us do.

As Digg grew, Digg Spy became less and less representative of the breadth of activity on the site. We began showing ever-smaller percentages of the activity on the site in order to keep the stream from becoming a blur. Thus, Digg Spy became less informative. When we added the Big Spy feature to the Digg Labs, a better and more entertaining version, the value and distinction of the original Spy became even less clear. We therefore elected to remove it as a feature that’s outlived its purpose. Digg Spy is dead, long live Big Spy.

One issue I suspect may be brought up is that Digg Spy is one place on the site that surfaces some burying activity. People have tried using Digg Spy to track burying activity and I won’t be surprised if conspiracy theorists accuse us of burying (pun intended) the feature to hide this. In fact, only a very small subset of buries on the site actually appeared on Digg Spy due to the small window of activity that was actually visible through the feature and any ‘patterns’ that people perceived by watching the buries have always been grossly inaccurate.

SUMMING UP

Occasionally pruning is the prudent thing to do – in these two cases, I’m confident that it’s the right course of action for the longer term vision of Digg. Thanks so much if you’re one of the people who regularly visited the podcasts section or if you enjoyed watching the Digg Spy stream past – we really appreciate your participation.

Cheers, Daniel

Hi guys – Just a reminder to tune in at 9pm EST/6pm PST for our first Townhall webcast – we’ll be broadcasting live at digg.com/townhall

See you in a few! Daniel

Hey there. We’ve just made a few updates to our Digg tools and widgets.

• Updated Google gadget – we improved the Google gadget so you can customize stories and see what you friends are Digging from your Google homepage. Don’t worry, you can still find the original stripped down version.
• New MySpace widget – you can now add a Digg top 10 list to your MySpace profile.
• Improved Netvibes widget – view stories, see what your friends are Digging, and customize what you see in your widget.

Give us your feedback on the changes and new widgets, in the Digg comments, to help us improve them in the future. Also, check out the complete list of Digg tools to see what else we’ve baked up.

If you’re following the US 2008 Presidential Elections, you should check out Digg the Candidates. We’ve created this page so you can track what the candidates are up to as the primary season approaches. Whether you support them or are merely curious, when you add one or more candidates as a friend you can track their Digg activity. Candidates with the most friends will bubble up to the top of the candidate page and you’ll be able to see a feed of all the candidate’s Digging activity in one place.

We’ve reached out to the current presidential candidates to ask them to participate. Many of them will be Digging, commenting and even submitting content. If you don’t see your favorite candidate on the page, feel free to contact their campaign staff. The page will be updated as we receive news from the campaigns.

Even as an export from the Great White North (yes, that’s Canada), I’m looking forward to checking out the page as the flurry of primary activity approaches. Go check out the Digg the Candidates page yourself.

As always, you stay classy Internet.

Daniel

Since we launched Digg Labs a while back, many of you have been asking for our Digg Labs applications as screensavers. We’re happy to say they’re now available for your viewing pleasure.

I’ve had some development versions running on my computer for the past few weeks and I’m sometimes genuinely reluctant to wake my computer from sleep — first I get mesmerized by how good it looks and then I get sucked into all of the great content and patterns that emerge.

You can now pimp out your desktop and catch more of the good stuff submitted to Digg every day. Check out screensavers from your favorite Digg Labs applications, which you can download from the individual project pages:

• Arc
• Swarm
• BigSpy
• Stack

Massive props to Stamen for building these out. Note, the screensavers are available for Mac and Windows users and include Adobe Flash 9 if you don’t have it installed. On the Mac you’ll need at least OSX 10.4 and on Windows you need either Windows XP or Vista. See our FAQ for more details.

As always, you stay classy Internet

Daniel

Following up on Kevin’s post from last week, we’ve gone live with improvements to our home page that allow you to see both news and videos on a single page. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that the videos are entertaining but people miss them because they’re isolated. Bringing them back into the stream on the homepage will hopefully bring more life to videos on the site. If you prefer just news or only videos, you can easily customize your view by setting either as your default home page (login and choose ‘Customize’).

To give the page a cleaner look and make it more functional, we’ve also tweaked the page and story summary layouts, streamlined the navigation, and provided more customization options. And with a new one-click bury, you no longer are required to choose a reason when you bury a story — this aims to help us get more feedback from people about what they don’t like (by making it easier to bury) so we can make more accurate determinations about unpopular content.

This update is also an especially important structural change for future content like images, which will also have its own dedicated section.

Thanks to Kurt Wilms and the other Digg developers who’ve helped make all of this happen. As Kevin described, we’ve got loads of stuff coming down the pipes that we’re working on in parallel right now.

As always, let us know what you think. Cheers! Daniel

A lot of people have been asking us to make it simpler to add Digg content to their sites while giving them lots of options for customization. Today we released Digg Widgets, built off of our API, which provides much more control than the current Add Digg functionality. It’s a great example of what you can build from the API but we saved you the work of having to do it yourself.

The first difference you’ll notice are the display themes, with lots of control over how your widget looks. You can customize everything from the background color to borders, titles, link color, and more. New display options include the option to display Digg counts next to each story. In addition to newly popular stories, we also now include Top 10 lists as well as the ability to filter content from a specific domain, so you can keep up with the most recent popular content from your favorite sites. If you’re a content publisher, you can now easily display a widget filtered just for content from your site.

Digg Widgets replaces the old method of including a list of Digg stories on your site, which a lot of you were using. No need to worry – the old way will continue to work. If you use the older method of including news on your site, try out the new features and take more control of what to include and how it’s displayed.

Also included in this release are several updates to the Arc visualization in Digg Labs, which we made with the help of Stamen Design and Intel after getting a ton of great feedback from the Digg community. There are a bunch of great improvements:

• It’s much easier now to see who has Dugg the stories displayed in the Arc
• We included a speed control, which a lot of you asked for
• Improved interaction – easier to go from the outside of the arc to the center
• Better control over the arc mousovers (to prevent accidental mouseovers)

The Diggs are in and you’ve chosen the winners of the Flash API Contest! Chris Alvares, Ryan Robinson, and Hart Woolery came out on top. Check out Digg Labs to view the apps that they created. We’ll be featuring them in Labs for a little while so more of you will have an opportunity to check out their creations.

There are lots of people that we want to thank for helping make this contest happen. First, we want to thank everyone in the Digg community for choosing the winners from amongst the finalists. Second, thanks to the many people who created works for the contest. We were really blown away with the range of works and the creativity that was represented in each. Finally, thanks to the great sponsors who provided the awesome prizes for our contestants. The finalists and winners will be receiving some pretty sweet prizes.

There was a tremendous amount of interest and we hope everyone enjoyed trying out these apps as much as we did.