Ever since Digg opened its API, talented programmers have built a ton of tools that utilize Digg. Some of these tools monitor upcoming and popular stories. Others tell you about your account statistics and your circle of friends. Yet others allow users to browse stories, videos, and pictures in very unique and flashy ways. Here are twenty-nine tools, with some being lesser known than others, but all of them having some pretty significant purpose in the life of a Digger.

1. diggwatcher is a simple application built in Flash that runs in the background and monitors a single Digg story of your choosing. You can receive sound alerts when you get new Diggs, comments, and when your story becomes popular. The script refreshes every 60 seconds.

2. The Digg Noise Filter is a tool that will let you watch upcoming stories before they become popular… that’s if you don’t want to use the regular Digg upcoming tool. (Developed by Russ Jones)

3. Digg Entourage was also developed by Russ Jones and shows you who is in your Digg social circle by avatar and also in table format (number of stories Dugg, percentage of stories Dugg, and whether they’re your friend or fan):

Social media marketing can be very effective if done the right way, but if it backfires, the fallout can be pretty undesirable. Such was the case for this Digg story, which compared multiple web hosting companies and watched as these hosts handled the traffic spikes that resulted from the Digg effect.

Note how I bolded a specific term: web hosting. Digg is the social media network of tech geeks, and the Digg statistics should not be too surprising: 39% of Diggers publish their own blog. That means that 39% of Digg’s 1million+ members have considered web hosting, and the winner of the most reliable web host was a company that … apparently was pulled out of thin air.

A few weeks later, a surprising blog post was published that outed the marketing firm and hosting company that sponsored the particular study. It turned out, with investigation, that the “experiment” conducted was not apparently legitimate. One of the non-convinced individuals who found the Digg story took the liberty to look further into this company, Burton Hosting, and the study. Even I could have looked further. In my past positions as a web hosting administrator, I’ve heard of no-name hosting firms, in addition to the obvious well known hosts such as Rackspace, midPhase, MediaTemple, 1&1, HostPC, KnownHost, LiquidWeb, BlueHost, DreamHost… but where and who the hell is Burton Hosting, and what the heck made it perform better than highly reputable hosts that Burton was compared to in the study?

With the launch of the private beta of Pownce, the new microblogging network launched by Digg celebrities Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and Leah Culver, people are claiming that it is the Twitter killer. After a somewhat heated debate with a friend, I’m not so sure that’s the case. At the present time, each microblogging platform has its pros … and its cons. Let’s look at the benefits to each and evaluate to see who is the victor.

Round 1: Interface.

Part A: Layout

Here’s my cute little public page on Pownce.

Compare that with my cute little public page on Twitter.

At first glance, Pownce is the clear winner. The interface is a lot more sleek than Twitter.

Layout Results: Pownce 1, Twitter 0

Part B: Layout Personalization

Let’s take a look at the layout functionality and personalization options.

Pownce doesn’t give you much customization options. You can only choose one of four available themes.

On the other hand, you can upload a background of your choosing to your Twitter page.