It’s been a busy week over at Digg and the changes just keep on coming. It began with the public release of the new Digg, which I happened to like, but many did not. The loudest noises are coming from Digg’s old guard and it’s not surprising since the new Digg is designed to allow a wider variety of users to rise to the top, not just the dedicated few.

Digg founder Kevin Rose responded to many of the complaints in his blog this week. Some were valid points which he says they’re taking into consideration. Some were features that were accidentally broken in the transitions, but some, like the fact that comments from your friends rise above all, were intentional. So, live with it, is the message.

The best part of the blog post is what you see at the bottom.

You can Tweet this post, send it to Facebook, but Digg it is not an option. Oh my.

On the upside, TechCrunch has reported that Digg has a new CEO. It’s Matt Williams who has been with Amazon since 1999. Kevin Rose will step down to the roll he was in before, that of Chief Architect.

ClickZ reported on more interesting Digg news today with a story about the first brands who have set up official Digg accounts. Wait, brand names as individual identities, residing alongside real people? Where have I seen that before. . .

Red Bull, Electronic Arts and GE Ecomagination are some of the brands that are breaking the ice. As with those “other” sites, following one of these brands will cause their content to show up in your personal “My News” feed. It will be interesting to see if the brands end up posting the same kind of material they post to Twitter or Facebook. Digg is supposed to be about sharing interesting finds from around the web, but the new site makes it so easy to digg the company blog and other social media feeds, there’s no way it’s not going to turn into yet another avenue for direct self-promotion.

What I’d like to see are brands behaving more like average users, submitting links that are relevant to their audience but not directly related to their brand. For example, Red Bull digging a link to a video of people doing crazy physical stunts with no mention of their product. It’s viral, it suits their brand and they’ll still get the benefit of having their name attached to the link in everyone’s news stream.

To be fair, it’s possible that the new brands on Digg are already doing this. I don’t know, because when I went to investigate, I got this:

Looks like there’s more stormy weather ahead for the once mighty social media site.