Hey everyone,

I’m excited to announce our next Digg Dialogg with Virgin Group founder and record-breaking adventurer, Sir Richard Branson. We wanted to pay homage to his various aviation pursuits, so for this next installment, Huffington Post Co-Founder Arianna Huffington will be conducting the interview on Virgin America’s inaugural flight from San Francisco to Orange County. We’ll post the interview on the Digg Dialogg page this Monday, May 4th at 10:00am PDT.

Early in his career, Branson led Virgin Music to become one of the top music companies in the world, signing legendary bands like the Sex Pistols and The Rolling Stones. Virgin Group later expanded into other sectors including aviation, hospitality, telecommunications, financial services and clean energy. Branson is also known for his bold attempts to break world records, including the fastest crossing of the Atlantic by boat and transversing the globe in a hot air balloon (breaking the world record crossing the Pacific from Japan to Arctic Canada).

For those of you unfamiliar with Digg Dialogg, it gives you the opportunity to submit and vote up questions that will be posed to influential leaders, change agents and luminaries. Check out previous Digg Dialogg episodes with Nancy Pelosi, Trent Reznor, Al Gore and John Boehner. Sir Richard Branson will be our first business mogul and global adventurer, and should provide an interesting perspective on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

Submit and vote on your favorite questions on the Digg Dialogg page. And as always, let us know what guests you’d like to see in the future.

Thanks,
Kevin

Since we launched the DiggBar, we’ve received valuable feedback from the Digg community, publishers, SEO industry experts and Google. We believe that the DiggBar provides a more seamless way to discover and share content on Digg.  Since the launch a little more than a week ago, roughly 45% of all Digging activity is now happening on the Diggbar and over 25% of all DiggBar users are discovering new content they otherwise wouldn’t have by viewing related stories and content from the same source. We’ve also seen a 10% increase in users sharing short-URLs across Twitter, Facebook, email and other places.

Along with all of the positive feedback and results, we’ve also heard your concerns that we take seriously and want to address quickly. We are rolling out a few key changes over the next week or so.

1. New treatment to the behavior of Digg short URLs. All anonymous users, on or off Digg will be taken directly to the publishers content via a permanent redirect (301), no toolbar, straight to the site. Logged in users that have not opted out will continue to see the DiggBar (200). These changes ensure that content providers receive full search engine ‘juice’ or credit for all links on and off Digg. They also ensure that Digg short URLs won’t appear in the indexes of any major search engines.

2. Because we want to ensure the best user experience, the DiggBar will soon only be shown to you when you are logged into Digg. While the vast majority of Digg users find the DiggBar valuable (only a very small number of users have disabled the feature or hit close with any frequency) we understand that many folks were confused when opting out. We want you to be able to have the option to permanently disable the DiggBar with ease. For registered Digg users receiving the bar, we are also making a few changes to make the process more obvious.

We’re working on these changes now and hope to push them live next week. In addition to immediate changes, we’re also continuing to explore better ways to integrate these tools into the browser as extensions.

As always, we’re continuing to take feedback and evolve the product, so don’t be surprised if you see additional enhancements and updates soon.

Thanks,
John

An apology is due – until today, Digg’s search has been pretty terrible. I’m really excited to announce that our search no longer sucks. In fact, I think it’s awfully good but you should try it out and judge for yourself.

Our primary focus is to give you the best possible stories at the top of the results right away. The first thing you’ll notice is an improved user interface but don’t let that fool you, there are significant improvements under the hood. We weight searches on a number of factors including timeliness, Digg counts, keywords, and others.

What’s new?

• A faceted model for filtering results means you can cut your results by factors like Digg count, topic, time, etc. It gives you a lot more information about your query and enables you to drill down to your result much more effectively.

• Advanced shortcuts allow people who are looking for stories with specific promotion characteristics to filter effectively. Add +p to your query for only promoted stories, +u for upcoming stories, and +b for buried.

• Common search tricks – like putting your query in quotes for an exact match and adding a negative sign before the term (i.e., -term) to remove that term from your results – now work.

• A graph showing the relative number of search results by month for the past several years gives some visibility into the trend of a particular query term over time.

• Searching for stories from a particular domain is much more effective. We weight recent domain-related results higher when you type in the full domain. Also, if you want to filter any query by domain, type it into the domain filter in the left column.

• New RSS feeds are much more useful. We’ve always had RSS feeds for searches, but with the new faceting capabilities, this becomes a lot more effective. You could create a feed that gives you stories with over 1000 Diggs about X and Y but never when keyword Z appears… handy!

• Search is faster now too. Not only have we added more functionality to the search, but we’re usually getting your search back to you significantly faster.

This new search will also serve as a foundation for a number of upcoming projects, so we’re happy to have it out in the wild. Go kick the tires and let us know what you think either by clicking the feedback link at the bottom of any search result or in the comments for this post.

As always, stay classy
Daniel

Hi all,

As most of you have noticed, we launched the DiggBar last week. This cool little feature streamlines your Digg experience by making it much easier to discover and share stories. You can now catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content while directly on the story (no more awkward toggling between Digg and the publisher site). It’s also easier to share stories with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and other great destinations on the interwebs with a shortened Digg URL.

The preliminary results have been exciting, and we continue to learn and make real-time updates to the DiggBar. We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors and many content providers have experienced similar traffic bumps this past week. Digg continues to have a symbiotic relationship with content publishers, and we anticipate these ongoing improvements will only enhance publisher traffic as more people discover and share content on Digg.

Prior to launching the DiggBar, we reached out to Google and SEO experts to ensure we adhered to the leading best practices, as we framed and linked directly to source content via the DiggBar. This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible. We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.

We launched a few additional updates early this week to address some lingering concerns in the SEO and publishing communities around the infamous (and sometimes mysterious) search engine ‘juice’. We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=”canonical” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well. This is recommended by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!.

There’s also been some discussion about how traditional web analytics and panel based companies like Quantcast, Compete, Nielson and Comscore track shortened URLs. While we don’t claim to represent any specific methodology, we’ve reached out to Comscore and Nielson and they both confirmed that publisher traffic statistics won’t be impacted by the DiggBar implementation. Also, any quantitative tag employed by Quantcast, Compete and Comscore’s new hybrid methodology will also register the source as the page view.

As always, we continue to monitor ideas and suggestions, so please send them our way.

Thanks,
John

Hey everyone -

Starting today, we’ll begin rolling out a new product we are calling the DiggBar.  Before we dive into the details, check out this short video overview:

The DiggBar allows you to…

• Digg directly on the destination site: No more awkward toggling between the story page and Digg.
• Easily share stories: You can now create a shortened Digg URL to share on Twitter, Facebook or via email. You can also type digg.com/ before the URL of any page you’re on to create a short URL.
• Access additional analytics: See how many times a story has been viewed.
• View comments while on the story page: Clicking the ‘Comments’ button expands the DiggBar to show the top comment, latest comment, and most controversial without leaving the page.
• Discover related stories: Clicking the ‘Related’ button expands the DiggBar to highlight similar stories.
• See more stories from the same source: Clicking the ‘Source’ button expands the DiggBar to show you more Digg stories from that source site.
• Discover random stories: Click the ‘Random’ button and you’ll be brought to an entirely new, unexpected story.

As always, let us know what you think. Look for the feedback button right on the DiggBar. Also stay tuned for some big changes to Digg search!

Thanks,
Kevin

PS: Twhirl users (a Twitter desktop application), keep an eye out for an update that will allow you to use Digg as your default short URL service!