On his first morning as Digg CEO, Kevin Rose shakes things up

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The morning after former Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson handed over the reins to founder Kevin Rose, the 33-year-old beer aficionado and online video personality has announced significant changes to the social news site’s architecture.

For starters, the company plans to kill off the DiggBar, a toolbar that sits atop all outbound links from Digg.com. The framing feature was lambasted by several bloggers and search engine optimization experts after it launched a year ago.

Rose was clear about his feelings on the toolbar. ‘Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet,’ Rose wrote on the company blog Tuesday.

He went on to discuss how the tool confuses Web surfers because it masks the actual URL of the page you’re on. Digg extensions that are currently available for browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer will replace the functionality of the DiggBar, Rose wrote, and ‘seriously revamped versions’ (emphasis his) are in the works.

Digg is also removing restrictions on which publishers can appear on the site. Over the years, a lengthy list of Web domains have been banned from Digg’s catalog.

Some websites would spam and attempt to game Digg’s system to hawk their wares to the social site’s massive audience. They will soon be pardoned. However, Digg will continue to monitor for malicious sites, similar to how Twitter screens certain links.

The changes will be incorporated into the next version of Digg. In mid-March, Adelson said the new version would trickle out to alpha testers in a few weeks. That was more than three weeks ago. But Digg spokeswoman Michele Husak maintains that nothing has changed in the release schedule.

It’s unclear whether these changes were in the pipeline before Rose took over as chairman and CEO. But a tweet by Rose on Tuesday seems to indicate that ending the blacklist, at least, was his idea. ‘The Digg iFrame toolbar is dead,’ he wrote. ‘Also, I’m unbanning domains.’

Digg recently released free iPhone and Android applications to optimize the site for mobile consumption. It’s missing the front end of the iPad gold rush, but Husak says, ‘Stay tuned.’

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian