Digg founder Kevin Rose has put up a list of his New Years resolutions. Most of them probably won’t affect many people besides him, but one that sticks out is "Build a Better Digg." His list goes:

- Be mindful
- Zazen
- Build a better Digg
- Start a small tea website
- Climb
- Camp
- Video blog
- Fish w/my Dad
- Read
- Less drinking
- Make time to date someone seriously
- Run a 5k
- Budget

Well, some are paying for it directly, but if you don’t want to do that, you can just develop your reputation and basically make friends. That is really what it’s all about.

Everyone knows that Digg is a popularity contest. It can still be a great place to find interesting stories, but it’s not unbiased. You have to know people (or pay them) to get your content enough Diggs to really get noticed by the community at large.

Twitter can be gamed too? Who would have thought? If there is a way to get promotion from a popular social site, you know that it will be taken advantage of. It just becomes a matter of competition at some point, perhaps even with people being paid to help with that promotion (right Diggers?).

As you may have read, Yahoo News was the number one site for traffic the night of the U.S. Presidential election. While they may have had the most traffic of anybody on the web, they were certainly not the only ones to experience record numbers. Digg, for example received the most traffic in the site’s history.. Unfortunately for some users, this led to problems using it.

How much do you love your favorite online community? Your favorite social network? Your favorite social bookmarking site? Enough to buy a $5 wallet bottle opener? A $10 beer glass? How about a $185 laptop messenger bag? 

digg is evidently pretty confident that its users will be interested in such digg-branded items. The bag, "1337 digg" shirts and boxer shorts are now available. I’m not sure how long the digg Shop has been around, but the "newly remodeled" version is up and running now.

Digg has decided to do away with a couple features, namely Digg Podcasts and Digg Spy. As Daniel Burka at Digg The Blog notes, subtraction can sometimes be a form of improvement, and Digg believes this is the case here. He writes:

Last night Twitter launched an Election site that features Tweets involving the presidential and vice presidential candidates rolling in almost faster than you can read them. In Twitter’s words, "We’re filtering hundreds of Twitter updates per minute to create a new source for gathering public opinion about the presidential election and a new way for you to share your thoughts."

Digg has raised an additional $27.8 million from a funding round led by Highland Capital Partners. The company has now taken nearly $40 million from investors over the last three years.

Today marks the anniversary of one of the darkest days in our country’s history. Seven years later, the memories still haunt us, as well as fuel discussion. The web provides an outlet for venting, theorizing, and just plain memorial, and it’s as good a platform as any for just that. Nothing has a wider reach.

A top Digg user with a popular ratio of 34% has been getting paid well for promoting articles on Digg. His/her popularity has allowed numerous stories to reach the Digg Home Page, and when that happens he/she gets paid even more.

I received a tip in my inbox this morning referring me to a post on "Digg the Blog" highlighting a new program from Digg called "Digg Dialogg". Kevin Rose says he wants to give the Digg community an opportunity to reach out to "leaders of the moment."

Katie Couric isn’t the only vessel connecting Digg to the U.S. presidential candidates.

The trailer for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince debuted on the Internet a couple weeks ago and created some buzz unsurprisingly, and you can bet that as the movie nears its November 21st release date that the Internet buzz will be at full capacity.

Eric Schmidt and company could have a $200 million check waiting for social media site Digg. Google shareholders may be wondering why.

Rumors had floated for weeks Google was negotiating to buy Digg.com for purposes of enhancing Google News. But it looks like Google is already integrating Digg-like features in a surprisingly open round of testing in the search results.

With Google’s slate of engineers, one wonders why they would buy a site if they could replicate the same idea. Imagine results created by users voting them up or down, results users can comment on and rate the comments of others.

Traffic flowing out from Digg still hits entertainment-related sites the most, but recently the gap between driving traffic there versus news & media sites narrowed.

However this new product turns out, Microsoft at least deserves a hand for not making its name irrelevant or unwieldy.  As for the turning-out part, Social Bookmarks should be shown off for the first time this week.

The big social media sites receive thousands of submissions continually. Yours doesn’t have to be one that never escapes Digg’s Upcoming section, or the basement of any social bookmarking presence.

Last week I attended the SMX Social Media Conference in Long Beach California, here are some of my thoughts about the event.