Hey everyone – I wanted to give you a heads-up before the official announcement is made later today. We’ve signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year.

This move gives us an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with Digg’s growth. Best of all, it lets the Digg team completely focus on new feature development. Federated Media, which has been an awesome partner for the last year and a half, will continue working with Digg focusing on integrated sponsorships and custom programs like the Arc project in labs.

It’s important to say that we’re as focused as ever on a great user experience. So, no dancing monkey ads, and the design will remain uncluttered.

New (big) features coming soon…

Kevin

A lot of people have been asking us to make it simpler to add Digg content to their sites while giving them lots of options for customization. Today we released Digg Widgets, built off of our API, which provides much more control than the current Add Digg functionality. It’s a great example of what you can build from the API but we saved you the work of having to do it yourself.

The first difference you’ll notice are the display themes, with lots of control over how your widget looks. You can customize everything from the background color to borders, titles, link color, and more. New display options include the option to display Digg counts next to each story. In addition to newly popular stories, we also now include Top 10 lists as well as the ability to filter content from a specific domain, so you can keep up with the most recent popular content from your favorite sites. If you’re a content publisher, you can now easily display a widget filtered just for content from your site.

Digg Widgets replaces the old method of including a list of Digg stories on your site, which a lot of you were using. No need to worry – the old way will continue to work. If you use the older method of including news on your site, try out the new features and take more control of what to include and how it’s displayed.

Also included in this release are several updates to the Arc visualization in Digg Labs, which we made with the help of Stamen Design and Intel after getting a ton of great feedback from the Digg community. There are a bunch of great improvements:

• It’s much easier now to see who has Dugg the stories displayed in the Arc
• We included a speed control, which a lot of you asked for
• Improved interaction – easier to go from the outside of the arc to the center
• Better control over the arc mousovers (to prevent accidental mouseovers)

Last weekend Joe Stump, Daniel Burka, and I sat down and white-boarded the Digg iPhone app. I told Joe if he coded it in 48hrs, I’d buy him an iPhone. Needless to say, he got it done (nice work, Joe).

You can check it out at digg.com/iphone. You need an iPhone or Safari’s Webkit software running to see it working properly.

Here are some features in the iPhone app:

• Native iPhone-like story scrolling
• Mini permalink pages with top 5 comments
• Login and Digging
• Pagination
• Jump to any topic

Features Coming:

• Top Stories (24 hours/7 days)

Of course, you can still browse the normal Digg website on your iPhone, but this web application is a light and fast way to do it and takes advantage of some of the iPhone user interface.

Let us know if you find any bugs. We’ll continue tweaking over the next few weeks, but wanted to get it out there asap.

Big thanks to Joe Hewitt for the initial javascript as well as the jQuery team for their help.

Digg on,

Kevin