ReadWriteWeb

Yesterday, Jay Adelson stepped down as the CEO of Digg and was replaced by the company's founder Kevin Rose. Soon after this change of guard, Kevin Rose announced some sweeping changes for Digg. First of all, the controversial DiggBar, an iFrame toolbar Digg introduced one year ago, will be replaced by basic links from the Digg homepage again. Second, Digg will unban all previously banned domains. All of these changes will go into effect once Digg v4 launches in a few months.

StumbleUpon, the popular content recommendation service, just launched a major new version of its web toolbar, which brings the StumbleUpon experience to users without having to install a browser extension. The web toolbar is similar to Digg's DiggBar, and this new and enhanced version features a fully personalized experience as well as enhancements to its sharing features. While the WebToolbar doesn't quite feature the same functionality as the standard StumbleUpon toolbar, it does make up for this by being a lot more convenient to use, and, of course, you can use it on any computer as you don't have to install the browser extension to use it.

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?

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.