Hey all,

You might have noticed that we’ve updated Digg River, our streamlined version of Digg for web-capable mobile devices. It’s still not a complete mobile Digg, but now you can sign in and Digg the stories you find interesting.

To check it out, visit diggriver.com on your mobile device. (Sorry, some low-end phones can’t handle it!) Log in with your Digg username and password. If you’re not yet a registered user of Digg, use your desktop web browser to register at digg.com first, then log in to Digg River.

We know that browsing the web from a PDA or smart phone isn’t as seamless as it should be. When you click a story on Digg River, the target web site may not work well on mobile devices. But we’ve heard from many of you that you want to stay connected to Digg while you’re on the go. We’ll keep working to make it easier.

For the tech-heads out there: If you have a mobile version of your web site, and you want Digg River to link to that version directly, you can add a link element with media=”handheld” to your pages. For more on the handheld link element, see this technical discussion on Dave Winer’s blog.

Dave Winer is our inspiration for calling it “Digg River.” We wanted to give props to Dave, who has popularized the idea of a “river of news,” fed by RSS feeds, and we feel this streamlined version of Digg is in the spirit of Dave’s idea.

Digg on,
sbw

While we are hard at work on several massive Digg features, we were able to crank out a little new friend invite feature.

How it works -
Invite your friends to signup for a new Digg account at:

digg.com / invitefrom / [yourusername] <-- put your username there

After your friends sign-up, Digg will display your name on the homepage as a recognition that you’ve added someone to the community. Your profile stats page will also display how many friend referrals you have completed.

Note: We count someone as added after they’ve completed registration and they’ve Dugg at least three stories.

Thanks in advance for helping spread the word about Digg – and a big thanks to Spread Firefox for the great idea!

Digg on,

Kevin

Following up on my last post about reaching the millionth registered user milestone, here are the details for the party that we’re planning as a thank-you for all of your contributions to Digg.

We’ll be holding the party at Mezzanine in San Francisco on Thursday, April 19th, starting at 7 p.m. Since this event is for you, the Digg faithful, we have some cool ways for you to participate. Check out the RSVP page for more details. Remember to RSVP early, as we have limited space. There is some cool take-home swag that will only be available for early RSVPs.

Can’t make it out to S.F. for the party? No problem. Check out the RSVP page where you can find out how to participate in other ways.

Thanks again for your loyal support of Digg and we look forward to seeing you on the 19th.

Digg on,
- Kevin

Up to this point, we’ve been posting individual job listings on Craigslist and other job boards. Well, we’re growing like a weed, so we’ve now added a jobs page to the Digg site. From here on in, this will be the central place to find out what positions are available on our team. Got the skills? Perhaps you’d like to join us at Digg in sunny San Francisco (this might be especially appealing right now for my comrades from the north).

Currently, there are three listings in the jobs section, but there will be several more in the near future so keep checking periodically. Our Operations team is looking to find a DBA and a Senior Systems Engineer. Check out the job descriptions to get all the details. I’m also seeking out a super-skilled web designer with a strong mixture of skills. If you’ve got the experience, usability sensibility, and serious skills with the hypertext markup language and the cascading stylesheets, let me know. Again, check out the description on the new jobs page for all the details.

And, as always, you stay classy Internet.

It’s now been more than two years since the first story was submitted and dugg on Digg. Since then you guys have helped Digg move from a personal project amongst a group of friends to a huge online community. Now, your contributions in submitting, digging, and commenting on content have propelled Digg to a point I never dreamed of – as of today Digg has one million registered users.

I’d like to let this post serve as a thank you from me to you — the Digg community faithful. You’ve not only made it possible for the Digg team to continue the Digg concept in new and exciting ways, but you’ve also driven us, with a sense of pride and excitement that genuinely makes going to work a lot of fun.

For those of you who can make it to the Bay Area in mid-April, we’re planning a party to thank you for your contributions to Digg. We’re tentatively looking at an event on Thursday, April 19th in San Francisco. Stay tuned for more updates, because obviously this milestone calls for good celebration!

Digg on,

-Kevin

Hi All -

Just wanted to post real quick about some stories I’ve seen in the blogosphere regarding an alleged ‘bury brigade’ on Digg and on the Digg site blocking process.

For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works. We spend a lot of time analyzing our data and understanding how people Digg and bury content. We have spent the last 2.5 yrs building systems that ensure a diverse group of users promote or bury stories.

For what it’s worth, and to shift the blame off of the users listed here – quite a bit of this data was gathered inaccurately as the author states in the Digg comments. Please also note, due to the massive number of Diggs/submissions/buries and comments, Digg spy only shows a portion of the activity within Digg at any time.

I also want to point out a couple of important changes to the way Digg blocks URLs that have been reported by our users repeatedly as SPAM or that violate the Digg Terms of Service. We have tweaked some systems so that Digg is now able to be much more granular in the way it blocks offending content, so that Digg doesn’t necessarily need to block entire domains or subdomains. Apologies to any sites we’ve inconvenienced with our previous system.

Digg on,

Kevin