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"If you were to sum up what we learned from Digg Townhall #02, I would have to say it was... er... well... Jay Adelson really, REALLY loves Vernors Ginger Soda.\nWhile everyone hoped that we would get some serious questions answered in the second of the Digg Town Hall meetings, all we ended up with was a lot of promises of features that are being worked on.  Again, and again, we heard promises of things down the road, but nothing that was in the immediate future of the popular social site, along with numerous complaints about the fact that political news stories are taking over the site from technology.\nKevin Rose and Jay Adelson arrived early, discussed Vernors for the first of three times, and then got going, saying they would be covering the questions that had received the most Diggs without crossing over with ones they had answered in the previous Town Hall.  They also addressed that the new comment system may launch as early as this week if everything goes according to plan.  They are also working hard on their scalability issues as they are now serving up 230 million page views a month to 26 million unique visitors.  They figure it will be ready in approximately six months.  They also let us know that if you would like to help them speed it up, you can apply to work for them as they are hiring.\nThe first actual question to come in was about the decline of tech-related stories on the front page, and while Mr. Rose and Mr. Adelson seemed to try to be as tactful as possible in their reply, it was fairly obvious what they really wanted to say was \"get over it.\"  People are complaining about the fact political stories seem to be taking over the front page, but with it being an election year, this seems to be what is on every one's mind, so they did mention how everyone can set their landing page to whatever page they want.\nAmong the other \"in the works\" projects includes the long-talked-about forums, but they want them to be more fully integrated into the site than just being something like a phpBB install.  The other big project that has long been discussed, but may finally be getting closer to implementation is the recommendation engine which will learn more and more about the user the more they use it.  It will also be an even bigger motivator to always be logged into the site so that it continues to get to know you better.\nAgain the idea that the front page is completely changing came up and the person asking the question that the site is being overtaken by rude, agenda-driven people, and a lot of implications that they are the ones messing up the front page for everyone else.  Again, their solution seemed to be to remember that there are now over 15,000 stories submitted per day to Digg, and that the site is all about however you filter the site and set it up to be used.\nEssentially, the 45-minute answer session seemed to almost seemed to be a \"Yes, we hear your bitchememes, there's not much we can do about how people choose to use it, get over it.\"  Almost every answer they gave seemed to be towards either use the features they already have, or just wait for the new ones, but there will be no large changes to how stories are sorted to the overall populace of the site.  There was a good suggestion on a change to the duplicate system that would allow users to suggest duplicates as an alternate source to the original story submission, which seemed to interest the duo, but we'll see if we ever hear about it again.\nOverall, the \"Town Hall\" didn't seem very town hallish at all, and more like a chance for them to address some of their critics in a friendly manner while seeming to appease their most loyal users.  As for anything of substance, there just wasn't anything.  There were no major announcements, no news on rumors of series c funding, but we did learn a whole lot about Vernors!\nTown Hall #03 will be August 14th, hopefully there will be something of substance in that one.\u00A0 For those that wish to see everything in detail you can catch the archived video right here on Mashable."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/05/12/digg-townhall-02-wrapup/>