Hey everyone,

Some exciting news here at Digg today. I’m thrilled to welcome Chas Edwards to Digg as our Chief Revenue Officer. Chas will oversee all current and future revenue generation activity for the company. Chas is known in the industry and his experience is perfect for us at this stage of our growth.

As you may know, we’ve been very focused on building an internal sales organization at Digg as part of our monetization strategy. Over the past several months, we’ve assembled a very talented direct sales team that will continue to be led by Tom Shin. Tom’s team has hit the ground running with much success and I believe that Chas will be a great addition. Tom Shin will report to Chas and the two will work closely together on Digg’s sales and advertising strategy. In addition, Chas will focus on creating new revenue streams for the company including sponsorships, new advertising programs and channels as well as help to manage our continued relationship with Microsoft.

Chas comes to Digg from Federated Media (FM) where he, together with John Battelle, co-founded and built an incredibly successful media publishing company over the past four years. Prior to FM, Chas held various sales and marketing roles at CNET and Tech TV (a company near and dear to our hearts).

Chas will be transitioning his role at FM over the next few weeks and officially joins Digg on June 22nd. We’re all very excited to have Chas on board and look forward to leveraging his expertise to continue to create an innovative and unique Digg experience for all of you.

Thanks,

-Jay

Hey everyone –

Following the excitement of our last Digg Dialogg with Richard Branson, including the infamous fist fight challenge with Stephen Colbert, we are looking forward to mixing it up a bit. Join us for our next Digg Dialogg where we ask Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the top questions from the Digg Community.

Ask and vote on questions for Gov. Schwarzenegger…

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a world-famous athlete and actor, and most recently, California’s 38th Governor. His notable accomplishments as Governor include the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a bipartisan agreement to combat global warming. He is also a successful businessman and commits his time to charitable organizations, including the Special Olympics.

For those of you who’ve missed previous interviews, Digg Dialogg gives the community an opportunity to submit and vote up questions posed to influential leaders, change agents and luminaries. Check out previous Digg Dialogg episodes with Nancy Pelosi, Trent Reznor, Al Gore, John Boehner and Sir Richard Branson.

Governor Schwarzenegger should provide an interesting perspective on the economy of Silicon Valley, Proposition 8, the environment, and the upcoming California Gubernatorial race. So be sure to submit and vote for your favorite questions from now until Tuesday, May 26th at 12:00pm PDT on the Digg Dialogg page.

We’ll be asking Governor Schwarzenegger your most popular questions next week. We will also post regular updates to the homepage and the Digg Twitter account to let you know when it’s live.

We’ll be announcing more guests soon. As always, let us know who you’d like to talk to by adding suggestions in the comments.

Thanks,
Jay

Hey everyone,

The Digg team is heading to Seattle next Thursday, May 21st for our first Meetup in the Pacific Northwest. We’ll be convening at Neumos in Capitol Hill to meet fellow Diggers, raise a pint, and check out the band Wallpaper. We’ll also be sharing a a few Digg updates and giving away some Digg iPhone & laptop skins. If you’ve never been to a Meetup, check out some crazy footage from the last one in Austin at SXSW (South by Southwest):

Doors open at 7:30pm, so swing by if you are in town. More details can be found on the Meetups page.

Hope to see some of you there,
Kevin

Hey Everyone,

It’s that time again. We’re hosting our next virtual Digg Townhall on Tuesday, May 19th at 5pm PT/8pm ET. It’s been an incredibly busy quarter full of activity here at Digg. We’re looking forward to taking your questions and sharing Digg updates. So please submit and Digg up the questions that you’d like us to address. Kevin and I will respond to the most popular ones live via webcast on the Townhall page. The recorded video will be posted shortly after.

We’re looking forward to talking with you all soon!

Thanks,
Jay

Hey everyone,

Today we’re rolling out the long-awaited release of Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect allows Facebook’s 200+ million members to login and start Digging and commenting right away. If you’re already a Digg member, linking your account makes it easy to cross-post, sharing your Digg activities on your Facebook home page.

After connecting, you will now have access to Digg friend features, such as our green story icons that appear once a friend has dugg a story. You can also choose to automatically follow your Facebook friends, or invite your friends to Digg from your Facebook Connect settings page in your profile (don’t worry, we’ll never spam your friends, this is an option that you personally control).

This represents one of the largest and more complex Facebook integrations to date. Over the past months, we have been working with the Facebook team to establish key standards and best practices, paving the way for future Facebook Connect partners. The team worked through several platform, data portability and scalability issues. We’ve given particular care to what the end-to-end experience look likes like as you enter, merge, or exit one or both services. The preference pages allow you to easily manage everything in one place and you always control the information you share.

Privacy is really important to us, so we’ve ensured that you’ll always have complete control over your information. Whenever you Digg, comment, or submit, you’ll see a dialog window asking you whether you want to share that info with your Facebook friends. Sharing your activity isn’t currently automatic, so this setting allows you to publish only the actions you want to share. However, we’ll soon be offering an option for you to publish all of your Digg activity if you wish to avoid the prompt. All of your preferences and privacy settings can be managed from the settings page in your profile. Should you ever choose to disable Facebook Connect, all personal information will be removed from the Digg site.

Check out Facebook Connect in action:

If you have more questions, be sure to check out our FAQ.

Connect your Facebook account to Digg

This is the first step in a line of initiatives to make it even easier to share the content you care about with the people you care about. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions, so tell us what you think.

Thanks,
Kevin