At last night’s “Bigg Digg Shindigg” in Austin, TX, Digg CEO Jay Adelson briefly revealed plans for a massive overhaul of the social news site. This morning, I had an opportunity to chat with Adelson in-depth about the new Digg and what users, publishers and the web as a whole should expect.

To sum it up, Adelson says the new strategy will “enable social curation of all the world’s content and the conversation around it.” To get there though, Digg has re-built its entire site from the ground up, with dramatic changes that will be rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

New User Experience

The days of the Digg homepage as we know it — the most recently popular stories on the service as a whole — are numbered. The site is shifting toward a personalization model, where the homepage will be based on characters like a user’s interests, location, who they follow not only on Digg but services like Twitter and Facebook, and other “signals” from around the web like retweets, Facebook shares and more.

But Adelson notes that not all of these signals are created equal — for example, a retweet from a Twitter user with millions of followers will weigh much more heavily in the site’s ranking algorithms than one from a user with a few dozen. The concept of a Digg account is also changing. While you can already use Digg via Facebook Connect, the site plans to support logging in with Twitter, Google, Yahoo and OpenID, among other identity providers.







It goes even further than that, though –- users will be able to Digg and submit stories anonymously. Adelson says that this fundamental change will move the site from 20,000 submissions today to millions. Those submissions will be sorted into an infinite number of categories, with Digg auto-suggesting them with users able to make additions and help rearrange miscategorized posts.

Digg has also been watching what companies like Twitter and Facebook are doing for brands. The new Digg will eventually support publisher and brand profiles. Further, we might see something akin to Twitter’s suggested user list, where publishers and brands that accrue a large following and continually have popular content get recommended to Digg users.

Along those lines, Leaderboards will also be making a return to Digg, but not in the old form of showing just the most successful submitters site-wide. Instead, Adelson envisions leaderboards for the infinite topic and vertical pages that will emerge, letting Digg users become trusted sources in a given niche. Expect some sort of achievement system that will reward Digg users for “good behavior” as Adelson put it.

Because of all these changes, Digg’s suite of mobile apps is also going to be completely revamped, with changes closely mirroring those on the site.

A New Paradigm for Publishers

Adelson says the Digg we know today is “a bit like gambling” for publishers, where a story either hits the homepage and sees an enormous one-time spike in traffic or sits in relative obscurity. With the new Digg, Adelson says publishers should expect a “more predictable” stream of traffic, as many more stories receive placement on an infinite number of personalized user homepages.

Digg has a lot of new features in store for publishers, too. The new Digg button –- which we’re testing here on Mashable –- lets users Digg a story without leaving the site. Duplicate submissions will also no longer be an issue on Digg, because all submissions will be URL-based.

But Digg has much larger ambitions for publishers as well. Websites like Mashable will be able to include Digg comments (which are being re-done again) right underneath stories. But it goes further than that –- third-party comment services like Disqus will be able to integrate the comments right into their platforms, making Digg a much more relevant part of the distributed conversation game.

Beyond that, Adelson wants to provide publishers with analytics and even share revenue with them down the line in an effort to better monetize traffic that comes in via Digg.

Digg the Business

Beyond the publisher revenue share opportunity –- which is likely well down the road –- Adelson sees significant pageview growth coming from the thousands of new categories we’ll see in the new Digg. However, he’s not in a hurry to monetize them with ads, saying the company is in good financial shape.

In the long-term, he sees Digg ads –- which the company says are seeing some success –- as the primary driver of revenue. Digg’s also in serious hiring mode, with plans to add 50 engineers this year to help them deal with the inevitable question of …

How Will Users Respond?

Digg’s notoriously vocal community is in for some major changes, but the company is taking a very measured approach in rolling them out. Users will start receiving invites for the alpha site, which you can sign up for at new.digg.com, within the next few weeks. From there, Digg plans “continuous iteration,” to address user feedback, a process Adelson says is made possible by the site’s recently announced architecture changes that he believes will let them scale indefinitely.

Nonetheless, Digg is committed to its new vision. Within the next few months, the Digg we know today will be shut down, and the company will embark full speed ahead on its plan to be the most relevant aggregator and curator of the world’s news. How Digg's rabid base of current users respond and if the new strategy is able to bring new people under the Digg tent will ultimately dictate the success of the ambitious new direction.