Although there were blabs about a conceptual Digg bar for the social bookmarking site Digg some time back, there wasn’t any update on it until today when Digg has officially released it.

Here you have it, the DiggBar! DiggBar is a simple overlay toolbar which lets you digg stories easily, without the annoyance of toggling between the digg page and the original story page. Let’s put it this way: Whenever you want to digg a webpage, just put digg.com/ before the url and hit enter. A slick overlying toolbar comes up, from where you can easily digg the story.

Apart from digging options, you get several other features like burying the story, browsing related articles and surfing other submissions from the same site. Adding to its social flavors, you can also twitter the article or post its link on your facebook page along with shouting the article to your digg friends.

It’s also interesting to note that digg has added a Random’ button to its toolbar, directly competing with StumbleUpon which offers a similar random discover feature. You can also view the comments on a story you are visiting with the toolbar, although to post a comment, you will have to follow a link which will lead to its corresponding digg page.

When you view a story from the diggbar, its url changes into a shortened digg url, like http://digg.com/d1nnVZ which was previously http://blog.digg.com/?p=591

This is how you can use the DiggBar

If twitter is something that interests you, Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, also noted in the official announcement that soon the users of the twitter client twhirl’ will be able to use digg’s shortened urls as their default url shortening service, sounds interesting!

Any way round, Digg seems to have pulled up its sleeves to climb high in the social media race. Meanwhile, you can check out the overview video that Kevin Rose posted about the DiggBar.

DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.