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

Operations vs Engineering

In many companies, you have the engineers and then you have the operations team. Engineers complain that the operations people aren’t nimble and agile. The operations people complain that the engineers never plan or keep them in the loop until the last minute. In many ways it’s an uphill battle for most organizations. Because I deeply care so much about infrastructure, it forces me to play a dual role. I have to understand what’s involved from the engineering effort, and what’s required to fulfill the needs of the operations team to keep things moving at light speed. One of the great things at Digg is that the two teams work closely together to achieve the same goals. Respect and guidance is key.

Under the hood

We’ve been making a lot of changes internally. Starting with providing more ownership to engineers, and investing in infrastructure that will scale and allow us the agility to make rapid decisions. A few months ago we moved the entire Digg codebase from Subversion over to Git. Ultimately we saw the headaches of merging in subversion and we had enough engineers already using it on open source projects, that we knew it was the right direction to improving our foundation as a company. Working at Yahoo, I quickly learned how valuable distributed computing, storage and logging can be for an engineering team to function. At Digg we have been been making investments into our data storage infrastructure (Hadoop & Cassandra), along with building out massive logging infrastructure that allows us the ability to collect metrics and reporting in real-time. The core infrastructure team at Digg has been using Hadoop, and our logging framework to mirror production traffic against our test clusters to analyze performance and do internal dark launches. Performance is critical to engineering and our cost of operations. We’ve been working hard on eventual consistency between multiple datacenters, multi-tier caching, front-end and CDN performance, automatic failover of services across datacenters, and building a new software stack that isn’t just scalable and fast, but is also cost effective and flexible.

Open Source

Digg’s support of open source has been truly refreshing; considering at other companies I’ve worked at it has proven difficult to get patches or new projects released. Not many companies realize the true value that open source provides. VP of Engineering, John Quinn, saw this early on. I was really happy to see someone on the executive management team actually understand its importance. It was one of the many reasons I joined Digg. In terms of open source at Digg, we are heavily involved in the community. We understand its importance to our infrastructure as well as how important it is to give back to the community. We have developers working on: Cassandra, Thrift, Scribe, Hadoop, Hive, and memcached to name a few. Along with a slew of our own projects over on Github.

Bringing it together

Without a solid foundation to really build upon, you’re left spinning your wheels on cruft, frustration and telling the product people, that new addition or change is going to take weeks to months, instead of days. I like thinking in days, and sometimes that surprises people. When your tools are automated and your foundation is solid, it really allows you to iterate, test and actually make a decision. We’ve all sat in meeting after meeting trying to come up with ideas and decisions of what to do, just to setup up another meeting. You have to have a balance of risk, foundation, culture, open source and most of all, talented people who can see the big picture.

We have many hard problems to solve here at Digg, and many more amazing ideas to build on. We are making remarkable strides in just the few months that I’ve started working at this company and I look forward to the road ahead…

As we head into the holiday season, we’re excited to announce that we’re joining forces with one of the most charitable retail companies around – TOMS Shoes – to launch a custom Digg shoe. Designed by Digg’s own Danny Trinh, this classic style features a custom Digg lining and contrasting orange sole. The best part is that as with all of TOMS shoes, every pair that you purchase will provide a pair for a child in need. One for One.

Check out a brief video of Kevin & Blake – founder of TOMS – talking about how we decided to partner on this project:

The shoes are available starting today exclusively on the TOMS Shoes website, but since this is a limited edition, be sure to secure your pair before they’re sold out. You can go into the holidays not only sporting with a brand new pair of kicks, but also knowing that you’ve helped out a child in need.

Enjoy,
Aubrey

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

Wanted to let you know we hear your feedback on our implementation of the wallpaper-style, aka “skin”, advertising in our PC Games topic. This was our first implementation of this kind of ad, and based on your feedback we’ve made a couple of fixes to address some of your concerns:

• Fixed the readability of comments by allowing the window to dynamically size, instead of locking the column width
• Changed the ad image to one that is less distracting from the content on the page

And if advertising skins just aren’t your thing, one of our users provided this story on how to disable them.

As Digg tests new ad features and formats, we’re going to continue to take in your feedback. Thanks as always for providing it.

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

Today we’re excited to launch a brand new Digg store. Over the past year, we’ve gotten a ton of requests for specialty products, including items for kids and pets, not to mention additional styles of Digg-branded apparel. We’ve heard you loud and clear, so we designed the store around your ideas. In fact, we’re not just launching one new Digg store, but two. Here’s what you’ll find:

The main Digg Shop will always carry your favorites; signature Digg logo tees, hoodies, and the like. We’ve kept the quality high and the costs low, offering American Apparel and other well-known brands in a variety of sizes, styles and colors. We’ve added a few new products, including one of the most-requested items, a fitted ball cap. The design of the store lets us more easily swap out and add new items, so keep an eye on it as we’ll be regularly adding new merchandise.

Yet if you want to express your Digg pride and put a unique spin on it, we’re also launching a Custom Shop. This lets you evoke your inner designer and choose from hundreds of products to customize to your delight. Simply choose the product you want, add one of our logos (as little or as big as you’d like), position the logo and voila! Soon you’ll be wearing a one-of-a-kind Digg bathrobe or sporting a custom Digg guy scarf. We can’t wait to see all the creative products you make, so feel free to email us any photos of you sporting your new Digg garb as well as ideas and suggestions for the stores.

Thanks,
Aubrey

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.