Digg has launched some new Digg Buttons and a widget generator for publishers, which the company refers to as updated tools to improve speed, usability and flexibility of integrations for publishers. A representative for Digg tells WebProNews the updated tools are "one of the many steps we’re taking in advance of the official release of the new version of Digg to make the user experience more inviting and the publisher experience more customized and measurable."

The new version of Digg was recently unveiled at SXSW.

As with traditional media, it’s different strokes for different folks on social media sites.  And knowing your audience’s needs and preferences is just as valid in PR today as it ever was.

According to an analysis of social sites by online advertising network Chikita published by Mashable, people go to Twitter for news, MySpace for games and entertainment, Facebook for news and community and digg has a mixed bag.

Digg Founder Kevin Rose did an interview with The UK’s Telegraph, and revealed that Digg has some big and "drastic" plans for redesigning the Digg experience. A couple of quotes from the piece:

Digg has launched new extensions for the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers.

As we did last year, we have gone back through our archives and picked out some of the most noteworthy social media items we have covered since 2009 began. Now that 2009 is almost over, it was worth going  back and seeing what all has happened.

If you come across missing items, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Digg released a new version of the Digg API today, which lets developers write and contribute data via OAuth. This API supports the digging and burying of both stories and comments.

When Google’s current director of product management arrived at his desk this morning, he did so for the last time, according to a new report.  Keval Desai is supposed to be leaving Google in order to start a position at Digg.

Digg has launched a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends. The feature will promote "certain highly active stories" as they are trending, not unlike Twitter’s trending topics.

The feature could give stories a better chance of getting more exposure when they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily made it to the front page. Digg’s Kurt Wilms explains:

Update: Kevin Rose is now saying that his WeFollow Twitter directory will now be "more closely linked" with Digg as they "experiment with user influence as it applies to the Twitter universe." In a company blog post, he writes:

Digg has launched a new kind of ad called "Digg Content Ads," which the company describes as widgets that contain previous Digg homepage stories that are relevant to the industry or company being advertised.

To illustrate how this works, Digg provides an example of Adobe testing the concept with banners that utilize popular government-technology stories from Digg’s archive. This is illustrated below:

There’s no question that search engines can be a tremendous source of traffic. Social networks are also proving to be big traffic generators for a lot of content producers, and Twitter is one of the big ones.

However, it is Facebook and Digg that are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. Traffic is great, but traffic that returns is even better.

People who have been complaining that Twitter’s site needs an overhaul should pay attention.  Twitter’s added someone to its design team, and Mark Trammell, who will start one week from today, hails most recently from Digg.

Yesterday, Digg announced that it was changing the way it handles some links with regards to the nofollow attribute. The point of the changes is to cut down on Digg spam. Digg is now adding rel="nofollow" to any external link that they aren’t sure they can "vouch for." This means:

    – External links from comments
    – External links from user profiles

Digg announced today that it has tweaked its policy on the nofollow attribute on external links.

 "We’ve made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community," says Digg’s John Quinn. "These changes reduce the incentive to post spammy content (or link spam) to Digg, while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content."

Update: Digg shared some more details about how its search feature (relaunched earlier this year) works. Sammy on the company blog says:

" We’re using Apache SOLR/Lucene which helped us scale horizontally and solved many of our relevancy issues as well as enabling discovery of new content through facets.  Beyond site search, the rich set of features has allowed us build a platform that enables other features such as Related By Source and Related By Keywords."

Digg is putting a new spin on targeted advertising. It is always the goal of advertisers to target their ads as well as they can, but when you advertise with Digg, it will cost you if they’re not relevant enough.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Digg before, right? For the few of you that may have been in the dark for, oh I don’t know, the last three plus years, let me explain the service.

There has been a lot of talk about the DiggBar and its handling of URLs this week, after the company implemented some changes in its service. To clear the air, Digg has addressed the situation.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson issued the following statement on Digg the Blog:

UPDATE: Mashable has just confirmed that TweetDeck for the iPhone will be releasing tonight at 9PM Pacific Time. The app will be available for free at the Apple App Store.

TweetDeck is probably the most famous Twitter desktop app, so it really comes as no surprise that they’re now making the jump to the iPhone.

That’s right… TweetDeck for the iPhone.

Digg has introduced some new additions to the Digg API today. The company says with these, developers can create increasingly useful and interesting applications using Digg Data.

One of these new additions is a search endpoint, which utilizes the same search functionality that Digg introduced a couple months ago on its site. Users will be able to use advanced shortcuts, common search tricks, and search by source (domain).

StumleUpon announced today that it has launched a new URL-shortening service called Su.pr. The twist, however, is that this one is designed to help content creators actually increase their traffic with it. According to StumbleUpon, this is the first such service that does this.