It may be a semi-bold statement but it’s great to see so many Canadians involved with Digg. And the list of names seems to keep growing. Digg just launched their new universal taxonomy along with their much-anticipated photo support, and to help with removing duplicate photos, Digg enlisted the help of Idée Inc. Kevin Rose announced the relationship the afternoon before launching:

Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
We’ve added a new sort to the images section called “mosaic” view – it’s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images, we’ve added image recognition technology from Idée Inc.

Now, the others involved from the Great North hold substantial roles at Digg. Co-founder and Senior Software Engineer, Owen Byrne was actually the coder Kevin Rose hired on Elance to code the idea of Digg. Estimates as to how much it cost, range in value between $200 and $1000 at a rate of $10/hour. That’s pretty low for a 20 year industry veteran who holds an MBA from Dalhousie, and a BA from Saint Mary’s University - he also held a role as a professor. Kevin got quite the deal.

The next Canadian in the bunch is Daniel Burka - partner at web design house silverorange of PEI, and Creative Director at Digg. Everything you see at Digg - the layout and user interface and plenty more fall under the reign of Daniel. silverorange has worked on a few high-profile designs including: GigaOm, Bebo and the Mozilla Foundation. Not too sure how Daniel was hired but if anyone does - do let me know. His educational past is unknown but he’s also the co-founder of Pownce, along with Kevin and Leah Culver.

These are just a couple of Canadians involved over at Digg that I know of, and there may be more. As Digg continues to grow, we can pretend that a piece of it belongs to Canada with coding and design work all headed by Canadians.