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

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

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

We get a lot of questions about submitting content – what’s good, how to promote submissions, and questions about commenting on Digg stories. I wanted to give you all some tips in these areas.

Submissions

Digg is your submissions! All of the content you see on the site has been submitted by users like you – we want to see what interests you or is important news from your perspective.

When submitting a story, you should make sure that your submission isn’t a duplicate. Our dupe detection engine will do the work for you; if you submit something and see that a similar story has already been posted, go ahead and Digg the original submission. Of course, if the story you’re submitting offers a different perspective, by all means submit it!

When crafting your submission, we recommend that you use a catchy title and a creative description. Choosing a thumbnail that’s representative of your content goes a long way (don’t worry, we’ll provide thumbnails for you if any are available). Lastly, make sure that you select the proper topic for your story – topic lists are at the bottom of the submission page and will help direct your story to the folks who are most likely to be interested. When it looks the way you want it to in the preview, just click “Submit Story” and you’re good to go!

(Note, when submitting stories to Digg, make sure that the content doesn’t violate the Digg Terms of Use in any way. Examples include content that is obscene, pornographic, racist, or abusive. Also, make sure not to submit anything that is commercial in nature, such as marketing products or services.)

Promoting your submission

Digg gets lots of new submissions every day, so we understand it can be tough to make yours stand out. We’ve provided tools for you to share the story with your friends via Twitter, Facebook, and email. When you’re on your submission’s permalink page, just select the icon of the method you’d like to use (email, Twitter or Facebook) and follow the prompts. Make sure you’re tailoring your shares to people who are likely to be interested in the content.

Even though your story may not make it to the homepage, Digg is a great way to share content with other people. You can use your Digg submission to attract more viewers to your site, and provide a base for people to comment as well.

Commenting

Commenting on stories that are of interest to you is one of the best ways to “join” the Digg community. It’s an easy way to discover others who share your interests.

I hope this has been informative for you, and if you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact us.

Thanks,
Matt

You know those amazingly witty comment replies you always post on Digg? Does it sometimes seem as if the original commenter didn’t see them? Based on your feedback, we’re releasing a small feature that will send an email to that original commenter – now you’ll know for sure if they’re ignoring you. We’re hoping this new feature will foster even more communication and sharing within the Digg community.

Now, once someone replies to your top-level comment, you will be notified via email with the text of the reply. Note that this will only occur at the original top-level comment not on nested comments. Meaning, if your comment spawns replies to replies and so on, you will only receive replies to your parent comment. We think this is the right balance and definitely don’t want to clutter up your inbox, so if you prefer not to receive these notifications, you can easily change your email preferences.

We’re hoping you’ll enjoy this feature, and would love to hear from you on how we can improve it.

Have a good one,
Jen

There are plenty of Digg users who visit the site just to peruse the latest news, but taking the next step and digging into the social component of the site can greatly enrich a user’s experience. The community management team receives requests from users daily asking for help building their own communities of friends; the first step is to make sure you have personalized your profile.

Profile Privacy
All user profiles contain a bit of required information — the very basics about who they are and where they’re from. But we encourage users, especially those interested in growing networks of friends, to be as transparent as possible. That being said, we also provide the tools to restrict certain bits of information from being publicly visible. Not interested in sharing your age? We feel you. You can limit who sees your age, gender, location and full name by logging in and going to your profile settings.

FAQ: Even if you choose to display these deets to “nobody,” you’ll always see your full mini-bio line when you are logged in and looking at your profile. You’re you, after all. So, to ensure that your public profile display reflects your settings, be sure to log out and then check out your profile: http://digg.com/users/YOURUSERNAME/ .

Profile pics
Our default icon for photo-less users may be artsy and cool, but if you’re interested in making Digg friends, do yourself a favor and add some images to your profile. You can add a plethora of photos to your gallery and you can specify which will serve as your icon, which is displayed on the site next to your submissions and comments. You don’t need to use a personal photo, but if you want to make friends, consider adding a picture of yourself to your gallery. These days, there’s really no excuse not to have a personal photo. Seriously, if you don’t have one, take one right now. And yes, it’s totally OK to use a MySpace angle.

FAQ: Need to remove a photo? Just go to your gallery, click a photo and look for the “delete” link on the right side of the page.

All about you
We want to know what you’re all about, but there’s limited writing space in your profile, so you’ll need to keep the description concise (bonus points for pithy and sassy). Similarly, while we provide you with the ability to add links to your other profiles or favorite online destinations, it’s best to stick to just a handful of URLs. Just be sure to keep it family — and nothing that violates the Digg Terms of Use, please.

With a pimped out profile you should be able to attract new friends, but don’t forget to look out for Diggers you already know. You can search for friends by going into your profile, clicking the “Friends’ Activity” tab, choosing “add friends” from the right side of the page and following the “Search for Friends” link.

You can also take advantage of our recently launched Facebook Connect feature, found by logging in and going to Your Facebook Connect Settings. The simple connection process lets you automatically befriend all of your Facebook friends who have Digg accounts. More info on Facebook Connect in the Digg Blog.

As always, we welcome your questions or comments. Contact us via email at Digg.com/contact or the Digg Community Team Twitter account.

Hasta pronto,
T.J.

After much anticipation, we are finally releasing several major updates to our dupe detection technology and content submission process that should go a long way in eliminating duplicate submissions.

To better understand the nature of the problem, we analyzed the types of duplicate stories being submitted. Most common are the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs. Our R&D team came up with a solution that identifies these types of duplicates by using a document similarity algorithm. Look for a separate tech blog post on how this works, but it has proven to be a reliable way of identifying identical content from the same source.

Another common type of duplicate is the same (or similar) story covered on different sites. Because this enters more subjective territory, we focused on doing a better job at detecting dupes with similar descriptive information. By leveraging Digg’s improved search technology, released a couple months back, we now match stories with similar titles and descriptions with much higher accuracy than before.

Most importantly, we made changes to an often cumbersome submission process. We moved the duplicate check immediately after the URL entry, *before* we ask for descriptive information. This eliminates the need to describe your submission before checking for dupes. In addition, the lag time from when a story is submitted to when it’s available in our duplicate checker is now a few seconds. These changes may take some time to adjust to but we anticipate that they’ll help to eliminate dupes and encourage folks to Digg previously submitted content.

While we pilot the new dupe detection system, we will continue to only block submissions of the exact same URLs within a 30-day period.  We’ll also be monitoring when certain Diggers choose to bypass high-confidence duplicates and will use this data to continue to improve the process going forward. As always, please share any feedback you have on these updates.

Cheers,
Chris

As of today, we’ve taken that one step further by upgrading our public domain waiver to Creative Commons Zero (CC0). The CC0 waiver expresses that content posted on Digg is public domain even internationally. A minor point maybe, but our previous public domain dedication was only clear within the USA. When a friend from Creative Commons suggested that we move to a CC0 waiver, to even more clearly affirm our intentions, it seemed obvious. And, as we try to always do when we change something that affects the content that you (our users) submit to Digg, we’re trying to keep you informed about it.

To reflect this change, we’ve updated the language of our Terms of Use agreement. See Section #6 of the TOU to review the new wording. The notice in the footer on every page of Digg has also been updated.

Go forth and keep doing all of the wonderful commenting, submitting, and voting – even more so within the public domain than you were before.

Daniel

We’ve been working on adding new ways for you to share the content you find on Digg – Facebook Connect launched earlier this month, and in April we added the ability to share stories via Facebook and Twitter directly from the DiggBar.

Starting today you’ll notice a few more changes to sharing options on Digg. We’ve listened to your feedback, crunched some user data, and decided to remove shouts. As some of you know, shouts have been a controversial feature since their inception and considering the ever-changing landscape of the social web, we’ve elected to remove them in favor of more popular options. We’ve added easier access to sharing via email, Facebook and Twitter. As always, we want to encourage sharing and communication within our community and will continue to look into features that address these needs.

On the homepage you can now mouse over or click on the “share” link to open a dialog box that offers sharing via email, Facebook or Twitter. For example, if you click on the email icon, we’ll open a new mail message from your default email client and all you’ll need to do is enter email addresses.  If you click on the Twitter icon, we’ll open Twitter in a browser window and populate the update field with the story title and URL (note that you’ll need to be logged in to Twitter at the time).

On the story list pages, you’ll see those icons directly under the story description (no need to click on “Share”).

A few of you may also notice that we removed the ‘blog this’ feature, which had really low usage. We think these changes better reflect how folks want to share content, and while we understand that some folks will miss the shout feature, we hope that you’ll give these new options a try.

As always, we’ll continue to iterate on features based on your feedback.

Have a good one -

Jen

Infectious makes really great, high-quality products and these skins are no exception. They’re tough enough to protect your laptop or phone and they’re easy to apply. But they’re easy to remove too, so should you ever get tired of the design (though I know I won’t!), you can peel it off without leaving any messy residue behind.

If you want to see one of these skins in the wild, we’ll be giving some away at our next Digg Meetup in Seattle on May 21st. If you’re in the area we’d love to see you there!