The recession’s effects have been lessening for several months now, with banks repaying their loans, consumer spending increasing, and the Dow currently around 2,500 points above its 52-week low.  Unfortunately, whether due to the recession or for other reasons (note: this occurred before the market started crashing), Digg laid off about ten percent of its employees this morning.

This move comes a month and a day after Kevin Rose replaced Jay Adelson as Digg’s CEO, and Rose, to his credit, didn’t either leave the news to filter out on its own or try to hide behind a press release.

Instead, on the Digg Blog, he posted an internal email that said, "[W]e strongly believe that it is the right decision for the long-term health of the company.  In order to achieve our goals, we are putting more emphasis on the engineering and development efforts.  In fact, we are still hiring for these teams as they are critical in getting us to where we need to be for the future, for our impending upcoming redesign and much beyond."

On a more personal note, Rose also stated, "This was an emotional and rough morning for everyone involved.  Laying off dedicated and hard working individuals is extremely difficult, but we tried our best to treat everyone with the utmost respect and support.  I hope all of you will join me in the effort to assist all of those affected, be it as a reference or a referring source and most importantly, as a friend."

Assuming the cuts were necessary, then – and that’s a difficult call to make – it appears Rose is doing a commendable job of reshaping his company.  We’ll just have to see how people respond to the move as word spreads.