At the end of this month Jeffrey Kalmikoff is taking the design helm at Digg as our new director of design and user experience. Jeffrey will be leading all aspects of user experience and interface design at Digg. He's a stellar designer and leader, who until recently was chief creative officer at Threadless and SkinnyCorp. I'm thrilled to be placing Digg in such good hands as I pursue a new project.

We've just made a few small but significant changes to Digg. For the past few years, all of the content on Digg has been licensed as public domain. Comments, story titles, story descriptions, and all of the other user-contributed content on the Digg site are explicitly put into the public domain so that others can do great things with them. This is good for the internet and good for society. As of today,

Our friends at Infectious have manufactured some sweet Digg-themed vinyl skins for all kinds of laptops and iPhones . There are two designs for each â€" a simple one with a single logo and a skin with scattered logos all over the place. Infectious makes really great, high-quality products and these skins are no exception. They're tough enough to protect your laptop or phone and they're easy to apply. But they're easy to remove too,

An apology is due â€" until today, Digg's search has been pretty terrible. I'm really excited to announce that our search no longer sucks. In fact, I think it's awfully good but you should try it out and judge for yourself. Our primary focus is to give you the best possible stories at the top of the results right away. The first thing you'll notice is an improved user interface but don't let that fool you, there are significant improvements under the hood.

In the next week or so, we'll be closing down the podcasts section and folding it into the video section of Digg. We'll also be retiring the old Digg Spy. Both of these features have become outmoded as Digg has grown and as a result they have a very small number of users )under 1,000( each. Podcasts will be rolled into the videos section â€" a better home for longer form videos.

Hi guys - Just a reminder to tune in at 9pm EST/6pm PST for our first Townhall webcast - we'll be broadcasting live at digg.com/townhall See you in a few!

Hey there. We've just made a few updates to our Digg tools and widgets. Updated Google gadget - we improved the Google gadget so you can customize stories and see what you friends are Digging from your Google homepage. Don't worry, you can still find the original stripped down version. New MySpace widget - you can now add a Digg top 10 list to your MySpace profile. Improved Netvibes widget - view stories, see what your friends are Digging,

If you're following the US 2008 Presidential Elections, you should check out Digg the Candidates . We've created this page so you can track what the candidates are up to as the primary season approaches. Whether you support them or are merely curious, when you add one or more candidates as a friend you can track their Digg activity.

Since we launched Digg Labs a while back, many of you have been asking for our Digg Labs applications as screensavers. We're happy to say they're now available for your viewing pleasure. I've had some development versions running on my computer for the past few weeks and I'm sometimes genuinely reluctant to wake my computer from sleep " first I get mesmerized by how good it looks and then I get sucked into all of the great content and patterns that emerge.

Following up on Kevin's post from last week, we've gone live with improvements to our home page that allow you to see both news and videos on a single page. We've gotten a lot of feedback that the videos are entertaining but people miss them because they're isolated. Bringing them back into the stream on the homepage will hopefully bring more life to videos on the site. If you prefer just news or only videos,

A lot of people have been asking us to make it simpler to add Digg content to their sites while giving them lots of options for customization. Today we released Digg Widgets , built off of our API, which provides much more control than the current Add Digg functionality. It's a great example of what you can build from the API but we saved you the work of having to do it yourself. The first difference you'll notice are the display themes,