Days after launching a major revision to its social-news website, Digg has appointed Matt Williams, a former Amazon.com manager, as its new chief executive. And man, does he have some work ahead of him.

The overhaul of Digg, which shifts the focus from a page edited by the masses to a personalized news feed, has angered some of its most loyal users. Many Diggers have been very vocal about staging an exodus to rival news site Reddit.

Of course, these types of rumblings seem to happen just about any time a large site has its formula tinkered with.

Twitter saw backlash recently when it released a feature called Retweet. A loud group that included the service's creator, Jack Dorsey, criticized Retweet for not letting users add a short note to those messages. The small music website TheSixtyOne heard angry chants when it unleashed a simpler version of the service. And such revolts make up practically a bimonthly tradition for Facebook.

So how should social media website owners, who find the cries are loudest on their own pages, deal with the attacks? The Times talked to some of those administrators and looked to examples from the past for clues as to how Williams might want to handle the indignation he's inherited.

Digg launched a new version of its social-news website last week, a long-overdue metamorphosis to hopefully compete with Facebook and Twitter. But those changes reignited an old competitor in Reddit.

For about five years, the two sites have filled a similar purpose. They both let users submit links and curate news pages.

Digg's traffic has long dwarfed Reddit's. That hasn't changed, but Reddit received a boost this week in the form of displaced Digg refugees, who say they feel dejected by drastic changes to the site's dynamics.

Traffic to Reddit on Monday was way up. That's when, as Reddit lead developer Christopher Slowe put it in an e-mail to The Times, "there was a concerted effort for boycotting Digg."

After a practically nonstop 20-year career working at and building  technology companies, what should Jay Adelson do with his time off?

Seriously, what should he do? He's looking for ideas.

Adelson, 39, abruptly resigned as Digg chief executive on Monday. During his five-year stint, he led the company's efforts in establishing itself as a top social news website, launching a new kind of advertising platform and acquiring WeFollow, the pet project of Kevin Rose -- Digg's founder  and his successor as CEO. Adelson is also chairman of the online video network Revision3.

Before that, he was the founder of Equinix, a public networking company that houses data centers responsible for keeping major parts of the Internet running.

Now, for the most part, he's free of day-to-day corporate responsibilities -- for now.

"Well, honestly I have plenty of projects to occupy myself with as you probably can imagine," Adelson wrote in an e-mail. "However, quite literally, I haven't been unemployed in my adult life."

In a blog post on Digg, Adelson wrote, "The entrepreneurial calling is strong, and I am ready to incubate some new business ideas over the next 12 months."

But he plans to take a much-needed break before then. Friends and family are pushing him to take a breather, he said.

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.

Say goodbye to the "Digg effect"?

Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson announced a vastly revised version of its social news website at an event Saturday during the South by Southwest Interactive conference. Users will soon have a personalized news page based on a number of factors.

Digg's changes, which begin rolling out to a group of testers in the next few weeks, are multifaceted.

Users can customize their news page based on who they follow on the site in addition to a practically endless number of topics based on a new tagging system. What stories bubble up for a given user is also determined by what that person has voted on in the past and on what friends on Twitter and Facebook are linking to.

Digg's engine crawls the page, analyzes the content and tags a link automatically. Site users can also add their own set of tags to a link.

Digg founder Kevin Rose dropped a morsel of information about a major overhaul to the social news website that's been a long time coming (at least seven months, which is like four years in Internet time).

The 5-year-old site (that's in people years) currently aggregates a list of interesting links around the Web as voted on by its users.

But it may take aggregation one step further. Instead of limiting the pool to input from its own users, Rose indicated that Digg may also begin taking into account link-sharing data from other social networks.

"We have to take a look at all the different sources of information and kind of just act as Switzerland," Rose said in the most recent This Week in Tech podcast. "If we're seeing a trend on Twitter, we can map that to the best stories on Digg. And if there's other things happening on Facebook and other networks, we want to be able to pull all that in."

TechCrunch has been speculating about what a "real-time Digg" might look like since May. It could resemble something like Techmeme or Tweetmeme, which both ping sites or pull from RSS feed data in addition to Twitter buzz. Add Facebook to the mix, and you could have an even grander idea of what's hot at any given time on the Web.

Rose added that the renovation was being helped by Digg's acquisition of the entrepreneur's other start-up, WeFollow -- a directory of Twitter users.

"We see ourselves as like a neutral Switzerland where we'll be able to sit there and pull in all different types of data and information from all around the Web," Rose said.

Rose said the changes could start appearing within the next few months.

The site has transformed in small ways over the last year, adding things like Trends for surfacing more timely news and an ad platform that could be a crucial revenue source. But the real-time aggregator couldn't come at a better time, as ComScore reports that traffic to Digg is beginning to wane.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Photo: Digg founder Kevin Rose. Credit: Joi via Flickr

This might surprise you, but the holy grail for many online advertisers is to make an ad that people actually like. Based on the current state of the banner ad economy, that might not seem like the case.

Thanks to the simple addition of thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on many websites, advertisers are finally getting a sense of how enjoyable (or annoying) their ads are.

The Internet has long provided a measurement of how effective an ad is -- that is how many times it was clicked versus how often it was shown, a metric called click-through rate. But that's based simply on how loud and flashy a banner can be in order to attract a reader's attention.

A click doesn't necessarily convert to a purchase, or "conversion" as they call it, nor are visitors guaranteed to associate the product positively. If an ad mimics a virus alert, it might get clicked out of fear or urgency but won't elicit a pleasant reaction once users realize they were duped.

Many social networking sites, including Facebook, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, are beginning to shift toward a subjective ad model. Initial results from allowing users to rate ads have been mostly positive. The success may be inspiring a trend, as advertisers throughout the Web seem to be toning down on annoying ads.

One of the boldest implementations is Digg Ads, which publicly launched in August and has tested exceptionally well, according to Mike Maser, Digg's chief strategy officer.

The new sponsored posts appear in the main content space and look almost identical (save for a thin gray line and small "sponsored by" text) to user-submitted news stories. Whereas an isolated graphic ad on Digg gets about eight clicks out of every 10,000 impressions, Digg Ads are pulling click-through rates of 2% to 3%.

"The results were astounding to us," Maser said. The advertisers are "writing copy and headlines in a way that's almost as if you'd want to share it with someone."

Ever since Digg removed a popular feature that lets its users communicate with one another a few weeks ago, some of the site's members have complained that the company yanked the "social" out of the social news site.

For those who are not steeped in the ins and outs of Digg culture, here's some background. The site used to have a feature called "shouts," which members could use to let their friends know about a story or item that they especially liked. Sounds harmless enough. But it turns out that some skillful Diggers used shouts to game the system and promote their pet posts, many of which landed on the homepage.

The upshot: Digg removed the feature and is now back to the drawing board to come up with another tool that's not as susceptible to spamming. That turns out to be easier said than done. Digg has to tread a delicate line between keeping its core members happy and being a website that is useful to millions of broader readers who rely on Digg to unearth interesting news stories, not just niche posts that were interesting only to a handful of power users.

"What we want is to give our users the ability to communicate," said Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson during an interview at a Diggnation event in New York a couple of weeks ago. "What we don't want is to create a system that's easy to abuse."

Adelson admits his San Francisco company hasn't yet found a solution. But he did share with us his broader thoughts on what it would look like. First, it would be ...

Google's suggested search terms for "Charlies Darwin is."

Computers can be unintentionally funny. Take the unlikely vein of amusement buried within Google's search suggestion feature.

Launched in December 2004 as a beta product called Google Suggest, the doohickey attempts to finish your thought as you type a search query. Suggest wasn't integrated into Google.com or various Web browser toolbars until last year.

Since then, users have found plenty of Google-generated phraseology quirks to snicker about. The most amusing findings have percolated on social bookmarking websites Digg and Reddit.

The game works like this: type a partial search like "Barack Obama is" or "Bill O'Reilly is" into Google.

The search engine then uses a series of algorithms designed to guess the most likely ending to your query, a Google spokesman wrote in an e-mail. Which means the results are derived from actual user queries, not with Google's software.

Anyway, if those guesses are entertaining enough, snap a picture of the list and submit it to your local social website.

For those too lazy to punch the previous two terms into Google, the search engine irreverently suggests that Barack Obama could be an idiot, a Muslim, a socialist, the Antichrist, "hot" or your new bicycle -- whatever that means.

Google offers a similarly variegated list of characteristics for Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly, which swings from racist, to idiot and back to the more flattering "nice."

Type "Charles Darwin is" and you'll find that in addition to suggesting that the British scientist is, yet again, an idiot -- the words "wrong," and "satan" may be just as likely...

When Digg joined Facebook and StumbleUpon last month in the pantheon of social sites that followed users to outside Web pages, all of a sudden it seemed every other social destination was deploying a frame toolbar.

Tsk, those Johnny-come-latelys.  You might not have known, but Reddit, the underdog social news site from Conde Nast, has had a similar toolbar for four years.

But don't worry, even some avid users of the site had no idea it was there. That's because, unlike those from its social media brethren, the Reddit toolbar is an opt-in feature, buried away in the preferences menu. Plus, it was lacking the visual polish and channel-surfing features that Digg and StumbleUpon have.

But today Reddit is rolling out the first major update to its toolbar in years. It adds all the expected features -- the ability to ...