Apparently, not only is Digg feeling the need for speed, but it’s feeling the need to make money too. And that’s good because this new idea is rather interesting.

Digg is testing a new type of advertisement on its site that basically surfaces old content submitted to Digg that is relevant to certain advertisers. So, as you can see in the example below, if Norton wants to advertise its new… → Read More

As the web matures, we’re continuing to see what I think is a good trend. Instead of trying to cram new features into services, emphasis is being place on improving the performance of the services. The latest to do so is Digg.

In a post today, Digg’s VP of Engineering, John Quinn, talks about what Digg is doing to try and make the site faster. This includes moving static resources like CSS and… → Read More

Digg announced a seemingly small, but rather interesting change on its blog today: It has added a “rel=nofollow” tag to every link on the site that it doesn’t trust. What this means is that all the spammers who submit their stories to Digg, are now basically out of luck.

Sure, all spammer who submit something to Digg hope that it hits the frontpage and brings a rush of traffic. But more important… → Read More

Digg’s been busy lately adding new features—some loved, some not—but they seem to be having a positive effect on overall. In June, comScore estimates the site brought in 8.8 million unique visitors in the U.S alone, up 31 percent over the preceding three months. Update: The July numbers just came out, and Digg’s unique U.S. visitors went up to 9.5 million.

What accounts for the change all… → Read More

Digg has just announced that it’s going to begin rolling out Digg Ads, the site’s innovative and experimental advertising product that invites users to vote on which ads they like best, over the next week. Digg first announced the new advertising product in June, and they were briefly spotted in the wild in July, though Digg claimed at the time that the ads were limited to an internal test. Digg… → Read More

Revision3′s PR firm is urging me to write about the upcoming Diggnation episode being filmed in at the Palms Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas with Kevin Rose and Ashton Kutcher. And I aim to please. But what I can’t figure out is, how do projects with Ashton Kutcher like this and the disastrous 24HoursAtSundance earlier this year help Digg find relevance in today’s world?

Sure, Kevin gets to hang… → Read More

You know those idiotic commenters on Digg? Sure you do. You know, “FIRST”, “LOLZ”, “URGAY”, etc. Yeah, those guys. Well Digg took a step today that could possibly make them at least 10,000 times more annoying: Email alerts.

Now, let’s be clear: This doesn’t mean that people who post an item on Digg will get alerts every time someone comments — that would be awful. Instead, this means that if… → Read More

A TechCrunch reader submits the screenshot above showing a user voted Digg advertisement for IHOP. As far as we know, this is the first time this has been seen in the wild.

The ads were first announced last month as a new type of advertising platform. The more users who digg on the ad, the less the advertiser has to pay. The more it is buried, the more the advertiser has to pay, eventually… → Read More

Earlier today we reported on a change in how Digg handles URL redirects from its URL shortening service called DiggBar. Users of the service are not happy – links are now sometimes going to Digg’s summary of the story instead of the story itself. The term “Bait and Switch” is being thrown around liberally, and Digg founder Kevin Rose is steering himself right out of the mess.

Before the change, a… → Read More

Since originally launching last April, Digg’s URL shortening service DiggBar has been marred with controversy, though things have mostly died down over the last few months. Now it looks like Digg has made a change to the service that will alight the web’s flames of fury anew, and this time their actions have moved from irritating to downright shady.

The change is a subtle one, but it will have… → Read More

IE6 has long been a thorn in the sides of many web developers, offering limited support for many established web standards that often force devs to implement ugly, ugly hacks. It might not be so bad if there weren’t so many people still using the damn thing over eight years after its release (and two full browser upgrades from Microsoft), but it still has an alarmingly large following. Its poor… → Read More

Since its inception, one of the biggest problems with Digg has been that users often submit the same content over and over again. This makes it harder for cool content to become popular because some users digg one submitted story, while some digg another. Today, Digg is releasing “several major updates” to its duplicate (known as a “dupe”) detection system.

The solution sounds fairly intensive. … → Read More

Late last year we wrote about an experimental advertising product that Digg was developing:

One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how… → Read More

Like everyone else, Digg has a serious case of Twitter envy. And they’re doing something about it.

In an interview last month Digg founder Kevin Rose told me that the company was working on an overhaul of the Digg service, calling it a “completely new direction” and referring to the new Digg search as an indication of what direction they’re going in. He didn’t (and still won’t) give many details… → Read More