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.

Don’t forget to submit & Digg your questions now!

Thanks,
Kevin

Today we’re excited to announce the premiere of DiggTV, a one-stop destination for all Digg shows. You can catch every episode of your favorite shows, including Diggnation and The Digg Reel, right on this new site. You can also subscribe to the shows in iTunes or other channels, so the shows are delivered right to you as soon as they are live.

Here’s what’s playing:

Diggnation: This weekly tech/web culture show features Kevin Rose & Alex Albrecht discussing this week’s top Digg stories.
The Digg Reel: Every week, host Andrew Bancroft covers the top videos from across the web.
Digg Dialogg: Tony Hawk. Trent Reznor. Sir Richard Branson. The top names answer your top questions in these exclusive videos.
Diggcetera: A miscellaneous mashup of Digg videos, including Digg Meetups and more.

We’ll be continually adding new episodes, shows, and features in the near future, so stay tuned!

Thanks,
Mike

Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there.

How does it work? Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage. Here’s an example of what a Digg Trend might look like:

The goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not. We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible. As always, we plan to iterate based on your feedback and suggestions. So, please – tell us what you think.

Enjoy!
Kurt

Hey everyone,

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.

Thanks,

Kevin

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 Digg today, but user influence and the data we collect during this process will play an important role in upcoming versions of Digg.

Stay tuned…
Kevin

Digg Content Ads are basically widgets that contain previous Digg homepage stories that are relevant to the industry or company that is advertising on Digg. For example, Symantec is testing the model with banners that pull in popular security-technology stories from the Digg archive:

At Digg, we think ads will feel more relevant (and thus work better for brands) if they feature the kind of content we look for online.  One way to do this – one that’s very native to the Digg experience – is to encourage advertisers to re-aggregate stories that have already been popular on Digg. The stories might be about a brand’s products or services, or they might be stories of general interest to that brand’s customers.

Also, it’s important to point out that advertisers cannot promote stories that haven’t already been promoted to Digg’s homepage organically. However, if the stories have passed the age of promotion eligibility, they may be featured in a content ad even if they were never promoted.  In other words, Digg Content Ads allow advertisers to re-publish existing stories into ad banners, and give those stories additional exposure within paid media; but they can’t use this approach to artificially boost a story onto Digg’s homepage.

As always, this is a work in progress and we will iterate based on feedback from the Digg community.

Thanks,
Chas (more here)

Correction: Example ads are “Symantec” and “security” related stories.

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)

Matt Damon is best known for writing and starring in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting. He has also starred in films such as Saving Private Ryan, the Oceans series, the Bourne series, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, among others. And his latest film, The Informant!, will be released on September 18, 2009.

Besides his achievements in cinema, he is active in philanthropy, including H20 Africa Foundation and Water.org. Some of you will remember him being named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2007.

In case you’ve missed previous Digg Dialoggs, the program gives you the opportunity to submit and Digg questions that we then pose to influential leaders in their field. Check out some of our past interviews here. They include Al Gore, Trent Reznor, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Branson, to name a few.

Submit and vote on your favorite questions for Matt Damon on the Digg Dialogg page from now until Friday, September 11th at Noon PT; we’ll be posting the full interview on Tuesday, September 15th.

Thanks,

Mike

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.

Looking forward to your questions,
Kevin

A recap of how it works: your Diggs, buries and clicks influence a quality score that determines how often the ad gets displayed, and ultimately how much the advertiser pays per click. The more you Digg an ad, the less the advertiser will have to pay; the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, eventually pricing it out of the system. The success of this system depends on your participation and feedback, as it will help advertisers to create the best possible experience for the Digg community. Our goal with Digg Ads is to encourage advertisers to create content as compelling as organic Digg stories, and to give you more control over which ads you see on Digg.

Over the next few days, some of you will see Digg Ads appear in rotation in various placements throughout Digg. The ads will look and feel similar to the Digg content you see everyday – stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – but will be clearly marked as sponsored.

We’re rolling Digg Ads out initially to small sets of users to help us test the product, so in the early stages many of you will not see them. We will continually iterate the product based on input from the community and our advertising partners. These changes will be rolled out over the course of the next several months, so expect to hear from us frequently on this topic as we work to create more compelling and innovative ads on Digg.

Thanks,
Mike