ReadWriteWeb

While we liked Digg's new DiggBar for its features, its release also created quite an uproar in the SEO community. Now, Digg has announced that it will change the way the DiggBar works, which should pacify a lot of Digg's critics. Among other things, the DiggBar will now only appear when users are logged in to Digg, so that content providers will continue to receive full credit from search engines, without Digg's iframe getting in the way. Digg will roll these changes out over the next week or so.

Last week, Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, coined the term Digggate in response to concerns of a potential scandal surrounding Digg, Google and the Diggbar. According to Sullivan, Digg is deliberately skirting issues surrounding the new Diggbar and consequently confusing and potentially misleading citizens of the Web.

Andy Sorcini, long time Digg user and social media enthusiast disagrees. "I honestly don't believe that the Diggbar was conceived with any maliciousness toward stealing content producers link juice. I think the idea was to drive traffic to Digg, while at the same time facilitate access to Digg services from content producers sites."

So, is the new Diggbar evil or will it be remembered as one of Digg's finest moments?

For discovering new content and participating in an active community, Digg is awesome. But, everyone who has used the service for a while knows that Digg search has been mediocre at best, returning different results from one day to the next. All that has changed today with the just-announced Digg Search overhaul. Designed by (in Kevin's words) pretty bad ass engineers, the new search takes in to account a lot of under-the-hood Digg mechanics when selecting what results to show you, while simultaneously improving the user interface and usability.

And we have a bookmarklet that makes it even better!

In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see some comments directly from the toolbar, though this is currently restricted to the latest, most controversial, and the most popular comments.

Some of us know what hitting the front page of Digg can do: send 20,000 - 200,000+ clicks through to a site. Some of us have even felt the blessing (or curse, depending on how you look at it) of the Digg Effect. But how much do you know about integrating social media, specifically Digg, into your site, and what the benefits of doing so can bring to publishers?

Bob Buch, VP of business development for Digg spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today and explained that if you want successful social media integration, you need to think chocolate chip cookies. "Much like social media, choc chip cookies are made up of five key ingredients," he explained, "and if you want to succeed, you need to know what those ingredients are."

If you like to follow the hottest news at Digg.com and use the Digg RSS feed to do so, you've probably been a little overwhelmed by the number of stories it pumps out. Now there's a simple web app that lets you customize the Digg RSS feed by the minimum number of diggs a story has received. You can then view the stories on the disstill web site or you can subscribe to your new, filtered feed. Sometimes it's little things like this that really make our day.

For the fourth in our series of VC interviews, we spoke with Richard de Silva at Highland Capital Partners. Richard specializes in digital media; for example, he is on the Board of Digg. So, he seemed like the right person to ask about the theories floating around the blogosphere that we are in an advertising bubble and that online advertising is doomed.

Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook's staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook. Facebook is obviously older than Digg, so while it has more traffic now, Digg's growth since its inception has actually been faster than Facebook's.

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and the man who two years ago removed the Top Diggers List after deciding it could be problematic for his site and its most popular users, yesterday launched WeFollow; a user powered Twitter directory, the idea of which appears to be surprisingly similar to the Top Diggers List.

WeFollow comes hot on the heels of Twitter's own Suggested Users List, which was created to help new users find people to follow. WeFollow attempts to provide a similar service but on a far larger scale.

Widely respected web traffic analyst firm Hitwise has just issued a report that we find, frankly, impossible to believe. Hitwise says that last week Twitter saw more web traffic than Digg for the first time.

We've posted the numbers and charts below, along with some thoughts on how this may or may not be possible. You be the judge. We don't believe it though. Why is this important? Because if the leading microblogging service really topped the leading user-voted news site for eyeballs, that would say a lot about emerging new media paradigms.