UPDATE: This image speaks for itself:

UPDATE: Leo Laporte had Digg co-founder Kevin Rose on his show and asked him about this. You can see it on Twit Live – the Diggbar discussion starts at the 11:26 mark.  Here is an excerpt:

• (Laporte gives Rose the background from an article on Techcrunch)
• Laporte: Is that true?
• Rose: That’s a good question.
• Laporte: You don’t know?
• Rose: I’ve been gone for 2 weeks so I don’t know what got pushed, what code got pushed and how it functions but my last understanding is that what we wanted to do is have it so that if you click on a Digg URL it takes you to the Digg stories so you can Digg it. Rather than providing a short URL service that just forwards and does redirection we would just do a URL service just for Digg articles. Just like the same way that Techcrunch does “techcrunch slash 85374″ – if you go to that you’re not going to go to some other site you’re going to go to techcrunch. That’s the story.
• Laporte: So you’re backing off on the original idea which is a general URL shortening service…
• Rose: Correct.

UPDATE: Digg has confirmed via email that this is not a mistake and the shortener is working as intended.

UPDATE: Let Digg know how you feel through Twitter. Send an @digg via @socialnews reply and your tweets will be posted here as well.

Either there’s an error happening with Diggbar or Digg just made a big mistake.  Before, those who clicked on the links when not logged into Digg would be taken to the source image, article, or video.

Recently, the links have been switched to point to a Digg landing page if you aren’t logged in – the pages where the story is posted on Digg, not the original source.

No word from Digg regarding this. No blog post. No onsite message. No reply to a recent email. They dropped it in and now it appears that they’re seeing if it sticks.

I’m still holding onto hope that it’s a mistake and not a conscious choice. [Read more...]