After months and months of being harassed by Steve Ballmer and Barack Obama, the Digg staff finally decided, for the sake of our sanity, to cave to their demands. Actually, after watching tons of stories submitted about these subjects and receiving countless requests from you, starting today we’ve added two new topics.

Under World & Business you’ll find “US Elections 2008” and under Technology you can find “Microsoft“.

As always, leave comments about this post on the related Digg story.

Digg on!

We acquired this timeless piece on ebay – sadly it worked for a few days and then just stopped working. The screen went blank, but we can still hear Pooka and friends through the speaker so it’s not completely dead.

If I can’t get it working again, the developers have threatened to stop coding. The repair has even stumped Kevin believe it or not. Please help me keep the digg staff happy and send your qualifications to: diggdugg at digg dot com. We are located in San Francisco so our only requirement is that you are local.

Thanks,

Nicole

We’re glad to announce an update to our Digg This button.  You used to need different tools to provide links on your site to submit content to Digg versus buttons to Digg content you’ve already submitted.  Our new Digg This button has finally been given a brain to do both!

It’s smart enough to detect whether your link is a Digg permalink or a URL and whether or not the content exists on Digg already.  If it exists, you’ll get the familiar yellow Digg box with a real-time Digg count to suggest visitors Digg your story.  If the story doesn’t exist yet on Digg, the first person to click on the Digg It link will be walked through the submission process.

You’re now also able to do a few other visual things with the button.  You can change the background color to match your site better. You can also choose an alternative new compact format, which has a smaller profile. It’s better if you want to have multiple Digg This buttons on a page, for example.

There’s also a super simple option for those not interested in bells and whistles.  Drop the code on your site as is, and that page will instantly be Diggable!

For all of the details and new options, check out the full set of details with samples on http://digg.com/tools/integrate

Brian

New flash visualization updates today. Leveraging our upcoming Digg API, Stamen has refreshed Digg Stack and rolled out a new app, BigSpy.

Stack Update
Stack now displays the digger and story title as the digg occurs. We’ve also added a quick pause to stack when you hover over a story title. Also new, ‘Upcoming‘ is now displayed with pre-digging activity. This way, you can quickly gauge what has been popular.

BigSpy
This is something fun we’ve been playing around with internally over the last few months – so we decided to release it so everyone could check it out. It’s not really meant to be used as a Spy replacement, but rather just something fun to glance at or project on a wall.

Digg on – enjoy your weekend and throw the football around : )

Kevin

!

Hey everyone -

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted and I wanted to get the New Year underway by clearing up a couple of perceptions that have arisen around attempts to manipulate (game) the listing of home page stories on Digg.

Since the early days of the site, we’ve known that people try to game Digg, and since the beginning, we’ve developed tools to prevent it. It’s obvious to us that this is just a normal dynamic of a growing site and is similar to what sites like Google, Yahoo! and hundreds of other sites have been dealing with for years. But in the last several weeks the noise around this topic has grown and so I wanted to post and explain our position on some of this and some upcoming changes.

Typically, we see reports of attempts to manipulate Digg through a few techniques, such as organized sites (spikethevote etc.), a company or individual site attempting to pay top Diggers, and groups of users banding together to digg or bury stories.

Have people tried to do these things? Of course…and we expect this to happen. We’re not surprised that with the gaining popularity of Digg there would be some that would try to manipulate the system for a variety of reasons. The number of users engaging in this behavior has been minuscule in relation to the overall size of the Digg community, but the idea of this behavior will always make for controversial press/blog posts.

We strongly believe attempts to game Digg are ineffective. While it would be foolish to say that Digg has never been artificially manipulated in the 2+ years (50,000,000+ diggs) we’ve been live, we’re confident that such attempts do not impact the content that reaches the home page. We work hard every day to develop tools and systems that guard against this behavior. Whether someone is paid or chooses to try to “break” Digg, it’s irrelevant– our systems can tell when it’s happening. Stories reach the home page only when enough legitimate users have put them there. Even if someone were paid to submit or digg a story that reached the home page, what many don’t realize is the combination of factors that ultimately led to that story getting there. The factors and the algorithm are constantly being tweaked to reflect the diversity of the Digg audience as well as to guard against manipulative behavior. At the end of the day, we work constantly to ensure that the broader Digg community gets to decide what makes it to the home page.

Besides the technology and algorithms we maintain, our strongest tool in this effort remains our community. I’m constantly amazed and grateful to the 99.9% of our users who want to make Digg a better place by contributing great content, digging and burying stories, and alerting us to behavior that seems out of the ordinary.

Which leads me to a disappointing trend that we’ve noticed over the past several months. Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg. These users have been listed on the “Top Diggers” area of the site that was created in the early days of Digg when there was a strong focus on encouraging people to submit content. The list served a great purpose of recognizing those who were working hard to make Digg a great site, as well as a way for new users to discover new content. Now, as the site has matured and we regularly get 5,000+ content submissions per day, we believe there are better ways to discover new friends based on your interests and what you’re digging. So if you have been digging stories about digital cameras and Oolong tea, you will be introduced to other top users with those interests.

So what does this all mean? After considerable internal debate and discussion with many of those who make up the Top Digger list, we’ve decided to remove the list beginning tomorrow. As for what’s next, we’re currently working on designing and refining the technologies required that will help enable our nearly 900,000 registered users to make real connections that we believe will greatly enhance the Digg experience – whether you’re brand new to the site or have been on Digg since the beginning. We plan on rolling this out in the coming months along with features and programs that do a better job of rewarding positive contributions to the Digg community.

Thanks for listening.

Digg On,

Kevin