The Digg team updated the site's homepage layout this morning. The most obvious improvement is the inclusion of videos into the "all" category on the Digg.com page. If you're just looking for quick, entertaining links, this is a very welcome change. Also, as Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka say in the Digg blog, it paves the way for Digg images, coming in October.
You can also now bury stories with a single click, and when you do, they vanish entirely from the page you're viewing. This actually changes the concept of burying. Users might now just bury stories to get topics they're not interested in off their page, instead of only burying stories that they have a more emphatic negative reaction to.
The new Digg top navigation also gives you a quick look at what your Digg friends are up to. It makes the social aspects of the service easier to access. You can also quickly jump to categories from the top navigation.
In comments on the update, several users were agitating for a new commenting system, but this update didn't address that function.
And still no word on a music category in Digg.
Our take here is that these are all good changes. And importantly, they're relatively minor. When a site with a vociferous user base like Digg makes sweeping changes, users often rebel. It's important for Digg to make its big changes in small steps, which is what the team is doing.