In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new version of Digg which is on the verge of launching. Beta invites for it are so sought-after that even Bill Cosby had to personally ask founder Kevin Rose for one on Twitter the other day. Thankfully, he got his invite. But for those of you who aren’t stars of one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, we have some good news for you too: we have invites. A whole lot of them.

The first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who click on this link will be able to sign up for the new Digg. And, as an added bonus, when you sign up, you’ll also automatically be following our TechCrunch account so you’ll have a nice full feed of our content to digg.

I’ve been testing out the new version of Digg for the past several weeks and it’s solid. Easily the best part of it is how much faster it is than the current version. Hopefully, they can keep that going as they get up to scale.

The entire experience has also been switched to be more tailored around personalized news stories based on who you follow and what they digg. This idea was sort of in place before, but it was far too slow. Now, again, it’s nice and fast.

Also nice is that publishers can now automatically submit their stories. This means that pretty much everything you will want to digg from a wide variety of big publishers should already be in the system. Obviously, not all current users are going to love that, as many enjoy scouring the web to find the best content that they can submit themselves. But if Digg hopes to differentiate itself from the rapid-pace link spreading of Twitter and Facebook, this is the smart bet to make.

Look for the new version of Digg to launch publicly soon.

Crunchbase

• DIGG

Company: Digg

Website: digg.com

Launch Date: October 11, 2004

Funding: $45M

Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see. Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg in the fall of 2004. He found programmer Owen Byrne through eLance and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea. In addition, Rose paid $99...

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