Microsoft’s new homepage design has less clutter and spotlights its Zune player. I prefer it over the previous style.

Digg adds content specific videos and podcasts in addition to the news. It seemed like the firehose main digg feed has become like 70%+ videos, so this seems like a logical progression. Like Microsoft, although not as severe, they’ve also made a few design changes. I like the options to better target what I’m looking for from digg and will be adjusting my subscription accordingly.

Also, on the podcast front — and due to the weather the Hmmcast that was scheduled for last weekend has been postponed until this week instead — you can add podcasts that aren’t in the database (Hmmcast isn’t in the DB as of this writing) in the appropriate category. I think ‘tech’ is closest from the subcategory choices: art/culture, business, comedy, education, games & hobbies, gov/org, kids, health, music, news, religion, science, sport and TV/film.

Broken digg images everywhere during update
Curious sidenote: when Digg went down to implement this new site version they broke their digg count image for every third party site, including this one, which can be seen clearly in the image featured in my last post. I wonder why they didn’t at least use that image space to produce a static image to return during the update?

Maybe the downtime was minima I don’t know, but it made several other sites I saw this morning display broken digg images, particularly the ones who put the digg count button at the very top of their site like the screenshot in the last post. This was why we have the digg image set to only show on dugg stories down at the bottom of the page. Don’t get as many diggs with this placement but it doesn’t make the page look partially broken during times like these. Maybe next time they’ll serve up a static image of the last known counts? Hope so.

• Easily link from your website to the Zune Marketplace with Zune links
• Seattle.gov starts podcasting
• Free directories to submit your podcast
• Hmmcast #12: Scoble leaving, Gates going part time, Digg vs. Netscape
• Hmmcast #6: New blog design tips, Xbox 360 music, HD-DVDs
• Thanks Matt: “Children of the damned for ya, this one!”