I’m excited to announce that our next guest for Digg Dialogg is Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Walt Mossberg, Personal Technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Co-Executive Editor of AllThingsD, will be sitting down and asking him your top questions. From today through next Tuesday, November 24th at 10am ET, you can submit and Digg questions; the top ones will be asked in the Dialogg.
This is an especially timely interview given the FCC’s recent statement in support of Net Neutrality as well as their work to make broadband universally accessible. Be sure to check back here on Wednesday, December 2nd to catch the full interview.
I’m excited to announce that our next Digg Dialogg guest is none other than skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. From today until next Tuesday, October 27th at noon PT you can submit and Digg questions that you’d like to hear him answer. As a the world’s most acclaimed skateboarder, self-admitted tech geek, not to mention the creator of one of the most popular video game franchises of all time, I’m sure there will be no shortage of questions for me to ask him on your behalf.
In case you haven’t yet caught one of our Dialoggs, the concept is simple: We let you submit and vote on the questions you want to hear asked, and the most popular ones are asked during the video interview. Recent guests have included Matt Damon direct from the Toronto International Film Festival and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. You can see all of the Dialoggs here.
Submit and vote on your favorite questions you’d like to see answered; we’ll be posting the full interview on Monday, November 2nd.
As some of you may have read overnight, Digg and WeFollow (a Twitter directory where users can add themselves under a specific category) will now be more closely linked as we experiment with user influence as it applies to the Twitter universe.
Over the last four years we’ve been continually evolving our (real-time) user influence calculations at Digg. Behind the scenes we track the types of stories you Digg, when you dugg something pre or post homepage promotion, and how your Digg influences others on the site. While not outwardly visible, many of these factors help us gauge when to put stories on the homepage or recommend them to others.
So what changes on Digg? Well, this won’t impact anything on Diggtoday, but user influence and the data we collect during this process will play an important role in upcoming versions of Digg.
It’s time for our next Digg Townhall. We’ll be hosting it live this Thursday, August 13th at 5pm PT/8pm ET. With last week’s beta release of Digg Ads, along with changes to the DiggBar, the API and comment replies, we’re sure you will have some great questions for us.
Submit and Digg up questions you’d like Jay and I to answer, and we’ll address the most popular ones live on the Townhall. As always, we’ll post the video on the Townhall page shortly thereafter.
This upcoming Digg Dialogg is sure to be one of the more entertaining and unpredictable ones we’ve ever done. We’ll be interviewing Sacha Baron Cohen in character as Austrian model Bruno next week. We’ll post the interview on the Digg Dialogg pageTuesday, June 30th at 10:00am PDT.
Bruno is the über-famous Austrian model and host of fashion & celebrity show Funkyzeit. He’s releasing his full-length film, Bruno, worldwide on July 10th. Known for his fearless interviewing skills and impeccable fashion sense, he recently made a pretty dramatic entrance at the MTV Movie Awards.
For those of you unfamiliar with Digg Dialogg, it gives you the opportunity to submit and vote up questions that will be posed to influential leaders, change agents, luminaries, and in this case an awesome entertainer and comedian. Check out previous Digg Dialogg episodes with Nancy Pelosi, Trent Reznor, Al Gore, John Boehner, Richard Branson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Submit and vote on your favorite questions on the Digg Dialogg page by Wednesday, June 24th at 12noon PDT. And as always, let us know what guests you’d like to see in the future.
We’re excited to be heading back to New York City on June 4th for our next Meetup. We had a huge crowd last year, so this time around we chose a larger venue – Webster Hall in Manhattan – to make sure you all could attend. We’ll again be featuring a Live Diggnation plus the sounds of Fort Knox Five, Ursula 1000, and a few other surprises & special guests to round out a full evening.
If you’ve not yet been to one of our Meetups, check out some scenes from our last one in Seattle:
Doors open at 7:30, but we’re anticipating another big crowd so are encouraging everyone to arrive early.
The Digg team is heading to Seattle next Thursday, May 21st for our first Meetup in the Pacific Northwest. We’ll be convening at Neumos in Capitol Hill to meet fellow Diggers, raise a pint, and check out the band Wallpaper. We’ll also be sharing a a few Digg updates and giving away some Digg iPhone & laptop skins. If you’ve never been to a Meetup, check out some crazy footage from the last one in Austin at SXSW (South by Southwest):
Doors open at 7:30pm, so swing by if you are in town. More details can be found on the Meetups page.
Today we’re rolling out the long-awaited release of Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect allows Facebook’s 200+ million members to login and start Digging and commenting right away. If you’re already a Digg member, linking your account makes it easy to cross-post, sharing your Digg activities on your Facebook home page.
After connecting, you will now have access to Digg friend features, such as our green story icons that appear once a friend has dugg a story. You can also choose to automatically follow your Facebook friends, or invite your friends to Digg from your Facebook Connect settings page in your profile (don’t worry, we’ll never spam your friends, this is an option that you personally control).
This represents one of the largest and more complex Facebook integrations to date. Over the past months, we have been working with the Facebook team to establish key standards and best practices, paving the way for future Facebook Connect partners. The team worked through several platform, data portability and scalability issues. We’ve given particular care to what the end-to-end experience look likes like as you enter, merge, or exit one or both services. The preference pages allow you to easily manage everything in one place and you always control the information you share.
Privacy is really important to us, so we’ve ensured that you’ll always have complete control over your information. Whenever you Digg, comment, or submit, you’ll see a dialog window asking you whether you want to share that info with your Facebook friends. Sharing your activity isn’t currently automatic, so this setting allows you to publish only the actions you want to share. However, we’ll soon be offering an option for you to publish all of your Digg activity if you wish to avoid the prompt. All of your preferences and privacy settings can be managed from the settings page in your profile. Should you ever choose to disable Facebook Connect, all personal information will be removed from the Digg site.
Check out Facebook Connect in action:
If you have more questions, be sure to check out our FAQ.
This is the first step in a line of initiatives to make it even easier to share the content you care about with the people you care about. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions, so tell us what you think.
I’m excited to announce our next Digg Dialogg with Virgin Group founder and record-breaking adventurer, Sir Richard Branson. We wanted to pay homage to his various aviation pursuits, so for this next installment, Huffington Post Co-Founder Arianna Huffington will be conducting the interview on Virgin America’s inaugural flight from San Francisco to Orange County. We’ll post the interview on the Digg Dialogg page this Monday, May 4th at 10:00am PDT.
Early in his career, Branson led Virgin Music to become one of the top music companies in the world, signing legendary bands like the Sex Pistols and The Rolling Stones. Virgin Group later expanded into other sectors including aviation, hospitality, telecommunications, financial services and clean energy. Branson is also known for his bold attempts to break world records, including the fastest crossing of the Atlantic by boat and transversing the globe in a hot air balloon (breaking the world record crossing the Pacific from Japan to Arctic Canada).
For those of you unfamiliar with Digg Dialogg, it gives you the opportunity to submit and vote up questions that will be posed to influential leaders, change agents and luminaries. Check out previous Digg Dialogg episodes with Nancy Pelosi, Trent Reznor, Al Gore and John Boehner. Sir Richard Branson will be our first business mogul and global adventurer, and should provide an interesting perspective on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.
Submit and vote on your favorite questions on the Digg Dialogg page. And as always, let us know what guests you’d like to see in the future.
Starting today, we’ll begin rolling out a new product we are calling the DiggBar. Before we dive into the details, check out this short video overview:
The DiggBar allows you to…
Digg directly on the destination site: No more awkward toggling between the story page and Digg.
Easily share stories: You can now create a shortened Digg URL to share on Twitter, Facebook or via email. You can also type digg.com/ before the URL of any page you’re on to create a short URL.
Access additional analytics: See how many times a story has been viewed.
View comments while on the story page: Clicking the ‘Comments’ button expands the DiggBar to show the top comment, latest comment, and most controversial without leaving the page.
Discover related stories: Clicking the ‘Related’ button expands the DiggBar to highlight similar stories.
See more stories from the same source: Clicking the ‘Source’ button expands the DiggBar to show you more Digg stories from that source site.
Discover random stories: Click the ‘Random’ button and you’ll be brought to an entirely new, unexpected story.
As always, let us know what you think. Look for the feedback button right on the DiggBar. Also stay tuned for some big changes to Digg search!
Thanks,
Kevin
PS: Twhirl users (a Twitter desktop application), keep an eye out for an update that will allow you to use Digg as your default short URL service!
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