There has been a lot of talk about the “death” of Digg and how Kevin Rose has distanced himself from the site, while he works on a different startup. According to Digg, Rose is still sticking around, and they’re not doing so bad.

“We’ve been hearing a lot about how Kevin Rose is launching something new,” writes CEO Matt Williams on the company blog.  “Everyone knows Kevin is an entrepreneur at heart, and he’s had many projects in the works over the past several years. We’re excited to see what he comes up with next. Kevin continues to be committed to Digg’s success; his role as founder, Board member, and Diggnation host remains unchanged.”

Williams took Rose’s place as CEO last summer after Rose filled in for ex-CEO Jay Adelson. As for the death of Digg, Williams takes issue with that too. He writes:

Since hitting a low point toward the end of 2010, our traffic has stabilized, and we’ve seen site engagement increase significantly: Diggs up 20%, time on site up 20%, and the total number of comments submitted per day is up nearly 50%. These strong numbers reflect both the passion of the Digg community and the tireless work of our engineering team.

Longtime Digg users have been overwhelmingly positive about our ongoing improvements. All told, we still have close to 20M monthly unique visitors worldwide, just about 1M unique visitors each day. We also have over 6M registered users, growing by hundreds of thousands each month. Depending on your favorite measurement service, Digg is ranked in the top 100-150 U.S. web sites, and our traffic puts us as one of the top news web sites in the world.

Williams also hinted at future plans for Digg. He didn’t get into the specifics of the direction the site will take, but it sounds like some new personalization features might be in store. Williams said, “We must head toward a future where the crowdsourced view can be combined with news pertaining to your own interests and news shared within your own social circles.”

Of course many people are already getting their news from this way from services that utilize Twitter and Facebook. It will be interesting to see what Digg does to compete going forward.