The Diggs are in and you’ve chosen the winners of the Flash API Contest! Chris Alvares, Ryan Robinson, and Hart Woolery came out on top. Check out Digg Labs to view the apps that they created. We’ll be featuring them in Labs for a little while so more of you will have an opportunity to check out their creations.

There are lots of people that we want to thank for helping make this contest happen. First, we want to thank everyone in the Digg community for choosing the winners from amongst the finalists. Second, thanks to the many people who created works for the contest. We were really blown away with the range of works and the creativity that was represented in each. Finally, thanks to the great sponsors who provided the awesome prizes for our contestants. The finalists and winners will be receiving some pretty sweet prizes.

There was a tremendous amount of interest and we hope everyone enjoyed trying out these apps as much as we did.

I and the other judges (Jonathan Gay, Shawn Allen, and Kevin Rose) have really enjoyed reviewing all the awesome works that were submitted as part of the Digg API Contest. It was really hard to choose the best works but we’ve narrowed it down to the top 10 submissions. You can find the finalists listed on the Contest page, along with links to each of the works.

Now the judging is in your hands. Between now and 8pm PDT on May 30th, you can view and Digg your favorite works and tell us which you think are the best. The top three will go home with some pretty sweet prizes. We’re excited to hear what you all think.

You stay classy, Internet.

Exciting new update to Digg Labs today. Thanks to the hard work of stamen design and support from Intel, we’re launching a new animation, Digg Arc. While the other animations in Labs are at the story level, Arc is the first app that provides a view of Digging activity at the topic and subtopic-level. Presented as a circle, Arc shows the most recently Dugg stories on the outside of the circle, with width indicating the relative popularity of that story against its peers. The middle ring is the sub-topic for the stories and the inner ring represents the topic. As new stories are Dugg, the story, sub-topic, and topic are highlighted with a quick flash.

Arc gets its name because of the lines that connect stories on the outside of the circle. These show when the same user has Dugg two different stories, highlighting connections between stories across different topics. We think this is a great way to discover new stories across topics because it’s so easy to see connections between them.

Visually, Arc is more dynamic than our other visualizations. Rather than moving pre-rendered pieces, enormous sections of the screen are being redrawn every frame. There is less caching, resulting in more complete motion within the animation. This can be seen as the shape and position of arcs change over time, as well as how the animation scales dynamically to fit the size of your browser or screen. Because of these relatively advanced features, Arc requires Flash 9.

Lastly, users can right-click to select the a full-screen view of the visualization rather than viewing it in the browser. We’re also making downloadable versions of Arc available since we’ve gotten feedback from many of you that you want to be able to run Labs animations as standalone apps.

We’re excited to have Intel as our first partner in Labs and want to thank them and stamen design for helping us develop Arc.

As always, you stay classy internet, Daniel

Just want to remind everyone that the deadline for submissions to the Digg API Contest is next Wednesday, May 16th at 8pm.  Activity to the API has increased significantly since the launch and we’ve heard of a lot of great works in progress for the contest. We’re looking forward to getting your entries and seeing how you’ve thought of visualizing Digg.  Remember, there are some great prizes available from Adobe, EA, Falcon Northwest, and Palm, not to mention the Digg schwag for all 10 finalists.

Stay tuned for more updates soon, including a list of the finalists with links for you to Digg your favorites.

Kevin

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

Hey all,

I just wanted to explain what some of you have been noticing around some stories that have been submitted to Digg on the HD DVD encryption key being cracked.

This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information – and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.

Thanks for your understanding,

Jay