We’ve just made a few small but significant changes to Digg. For the past few years, all of the content on Digg has been licensed as public domain. Comments, story titles, story descriptions, and all of the other user-contributed content on the Digg site are explicitly put into the public domain so that others can do great things with them. This is good for the internet and good for society.

As of today, we’ve taken that one step further by upgrading our public domain waiver to Creative Commons Zero (CC0). The CC0 waiver expresses that content posted on Digg is public domain even internationally. A minor point maybe, but our previous public domain dedication was only clear within the USA. When a friend from Creative Commons suggested that we move to a CC0 waiver, to even more clearly affirm our intentions, it seemed obvious. And, as we try to always do when we change something that affects the content that you (our users) submit to Digg, we’re trying to keep you informed about it.

To reflect this change, we’ve updated the language of our Terms of Use agreement. See Section #6 of the TOU to review the new wording. The notice in the footer on every page of Digg has also been updated.

Go forth and keep doing all of the wonderful commenting, submitting, and voting – even more so within the public domain than you were before.

Daniel

Hey all –

We’ve been working on adding new ways for you to share the content you find on Digg – Facebook Connect launched earlier this month, and in April we added the ability to share stories via Facebook and Twitter directly from the DiggBar.

Starting today you’ll notice a few more changes to sharing options on Digg. We’ve listened to your feedback, crunched some user data, and decided to remove shouts. As some of you know, shouts have been a controversial feature since their inception and considering the ever-changing landscape of the social web, we’ve elected to remove them in favor of more popular options. We’ve added easier access to sharing via email, Facebook and Twitter. As always, we want to encourage sharing and communication within our community and will continue to look into features that address these needs.

On the homepage you can now mouse over or click on the “share” link to open a dialog box that offers sharing via email, Facebook or Twitter. For example, if you click on the email icon, we’ll open a new mail message from your default email client and all you’ll need to do is enter email addresses.  If you click on the Twitter icon, we’ll open Twitter in a browser window and populate the update field with the story title and URL (note that you’ll need to be logged in to Twitter at the time).

On the story list pages, you’ll see those icons directly under the story description (no need to click on “Share”).

A few of you may also notice that we removed the ‘blog this’ feature, which had really low usage. We think these changes better reflect how folks want to share content, and while we understand that some folks will miss the shout feature, we hope that you’ll give these new options a try.

As always, we’ll continue to iterate on features based on your feedback.

Have a good one -

Jen

Our friends at Infectious have manufactured some sweet Digg-themed vinyl skins for all kinds of laptops and iPhones. There are two designs for each – a simple one with a single logo and a skin with scattered logos all over the place.

Infectious makes really great, high-quality products and these skins are no exception. They’re tough enough to protect your laptop or phone and they’re easy to apply. But they’re easy to remove too, so should you ever get tired of the design (though I know I won’t!), you can peel it off without leaving any messy residue behind.

If you want to see one of these skins in the wild, we’ll be giving some away at our next Digg Meetup in Seattle on May 21st. If you’re in the area we’d love to see you there!