Hey folks,

Digg has joined the DataPortability Project, a group of websites cooperating to help you securely use your data however you want. Why? Because you own your data. It’s that simple. From the start, Digg has supported the idea that you own your own data.

Want to sync your Digg friends network with another service? We want to help you do that.

Want to use your Digg activity to get recommendations from another web site? We’re working on that, too.

Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard. We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, which lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. We’ll be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months.

Check out the DataPortability site for more information. We’ll continue to give your data back to you in new, open, standard ways, so you can build a rich on-line life in ways we would never think of.

Thanks,
sbw

Thanks everyone for your comments on our video preview of the new upcoming comments system.

Now that we’ve had some time to digest all of your feedback, here are some of the changes we’re planning to include into this release, based directly on your feedback:

• Ability to change your up/down vote for a comment
• Display the number of Diggs and buries for a comment
• Ability to delete your comments during the editing time frame
• Display the number of replies to a comment you’ve posted in your profile
• When sorting by ‘most Diggs’, provide links to view original thread or reply to that comment
• A display of comments sorted by ‘best threads’, which will be based on the quality of comments in a particular thread
• Added the filter option as a profile setting
• If the post is <24 hrs old, display the time stamp in hours and minutes

We’ve also heard a lot of feedback on the number of comments to pre-load. We’ll base our implementation direction (number of comments to pre-load) on the outcome of performance benchmarking that we are doing.

Again, thanks for all the great feedback. We’re looking forward to rolling out an easier, improved system soon.

Logout Bug

Some users are experiencing session timeouts/logouts while Digging around the site. We’re aware of this issue, and performing code audits to try and nail down the cause.

If you’d like to help troubleshoot this issue, please send us an email to feedback [at] digg [dot] com with the following:

• Email subject: “Logout Bug”
• Does this happen while on the site or between visits to the site?
• If on the site, what where the last three things they did before getting logged out?
• What OS/Browser are you using?
• What is your user name and when did this problem occur?

That’s it for now. Digg on,

Kevin

Just wanted to give everyone some insight into some of the changes we’ve been making this week. As we’ve talked about in the past, Digg’s promotional algorithm ensures that the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page. Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page. Since Digg began more than three years ago, we’ve constantly been making tweaks to the promotional algorithm and will continue to do so. Most of our additions go unnoticed, and others take a few days to normalize as we watch them run live on the site. We spend a lot of time analyzing the data and improving the system.

As we point out in our FAQ, occasionally you will see stories in the upcoming section with 100+ Diggs – this is evidence of our promotion algorithm hard at work. One of the keys to getting a story promoted is diversity in Digging activity. When the algorithm gets the diversity it needs, it will promote a story from the Upcoming section to the home page. This way, the system knows a large variety of people will be into the story.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Digg on,

Kevin

Hey Everyone,

Last night the Digg crew attended the 1st Crunchies Awards here in San Francisco. It was great to see some of you out there, and we were blown away by your support leading up to it. Digg was nominated in three categories in company with some amazing sites. Your votes led to us winning the Best User-Generated Content category and a cool monkey to swank up the Digg offices.

Don’t worry – we won’t let it go to our heads. Keep telling us what we’re doing right and more importantly what we can do better, and we’ll keep listening and improving.

Digg on,
Kevin

Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

We’re excited about The Digg Reel, a new Internet TV show making its debut on Revision3 today. Hosted by the knowledgeable and lovely Jessica Corbin, the show highlights short clips from popular videos posted by all of you on Digg, along with comments from the community and stories behind the videos.

This show is near to my heart, as it’s collaboration between two of my favorite companies.

You can see The Digg Reel at www.thediggreel.com. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Jay

Hey Everyone,

We’ve been hard at work improving the comments system based on your feedback. We’re looking forward to rolling out an easier, more lightweight and speedy system soon.

Before we go too far down the path of locking down these features, we’d like to hear what you think of the proposed changes. Check out the video and let us know what you think by posting, digging up, or burying the comments in this thread.

Thanks for your continued feedback and patience as we put the finishing touches on the new comments system.

Digg on, Kevin

PS: Joe wanted me to add this mea culpa to the blog.

Hi All,

Just wanted to let you all know that we’re working hard to remove the obtrusive ads on Digg. We’re not cool with auto-playing audio ads, as you found on the site today. Right now the process for removing these ads takes time. Once we find the ad, we need to work with our ad partner to nail down the source, then block it from reoccurring on the site. This can take several hours to propagate through the system.

That said, we are working hard to speed up the process. This will take some time – if you happen to stumble across any other audio or overly invasive ads, as always please contact us: support[at]digg[dot]com with as much detail as possible (ad URL, screenshot, browser type, operating system) and we’ll get on it.

Thanks for your understanding,

Kevin