Digg has made some new changes today that are worth noting, including “simplifying the navigation”, updating the Candidates section, and adding an Olympics section to the site.

I first noticed changes were coming when the navigation went gray, or tanish, for me, which is the new color for the upcoming section.

Then I noticed the Popular and Upcoming tabs had moved below the category links in what appears to be an attempt to increase the visibility of the “upcoming” pages.

Once in the upcoming sections, you will notice that the old pull down menu for sorting has been replaced with quick links, which is actually quite helpful.

As you can see, sorting by oldest post and by least Diggs has been removed from the options as well. I am not sure that anyone ever used those options anyhow so it doesn’t seem to be a loss.

The Candidates section has been updated to reflect the recent nominations by removing the candidates no longer in the running for President.

From the picture above it is pretty clear who is favored on Digg, so remember that next time you go to submit something pro-McCain…

Digg has also decided to include 3rd party candidates as you can see in the picture below.

With the coming 2008 Olympics this summer in China, Digg has added the Olympics section to showcase all articles, images, and videos that pertain to the coming Olympics, although there is no specification that says it cannot include content from previous olympics.

I also noticed in the footer, there is an indication that the privacy policy has been updated.

I have yet to find the updates yet as they are not clearly identified on the Privacy page.

From a comment on Digg, it would appear that the Cloud view for upcoming has been removed. http://digg.com/all/upcoming/cloud now redirects to http://digg.com/all/upcoming.

From another comment on Digg, there has been a comment throttle implemented. I did a little testing as you can see below and I was throttled after 5 consecutive comments and was not allowed to comment again until 5 minutes of inactivity had passed.

“The force is strong with you. Please wait a few minutes before commenting again.”

If there is anything I missed, please comment and let me know.