PiticStyle

Interview With Digg.com Founder, Kevin Rose

Digg is a website at the forefront of social news promotion for technology-based articles. Users submit stories they find interesting to a continuously updated archive where others can comment or vote approvingly/disapprovingly. Articles with the most positive “diggs” are then promoted to the main page, and it is likely tens of thousands of people will then read it. Digg also features RSS and blogging capabilities for its user. To see a live stream of activity on Digg.com (articles submitted, promoted, demoted, and commented on), check out Digg Spy.

1) What is “important news” and can the internet public be relied on to “digg” it?

• Important news is news that is relevant to a specific community. Rather than having those editorial decisions made by a very limited number of people, digg lets the community decide. We believe in the wisdom of crowds. In that sense, digg helps people to sift through the “information overload” of the Web and the estimated one terabyte of new content that is added to the Web every day.

2) Do you think Digg is an accurate zeitgeist for measuring what the mass public cares about?

• That is absolutely the case within the community of digg users. We have traditionally been very focused on technology news. But, as we create new categories and subcategories of very different and specific topics, we will see very different definitions of what is relevant in these different communities.

3) What are Digg’s site stats currently? (Registered members, daily hits, how many stories posted daily, other sites that receive Digg feeds, etc.

• Digg’s registered membership is currently at 140,000 and is doubling every three months. 500,000 unique visitors come to the digg site every day, a figure that is growing by 100,000 each month. New content is submitted to the digg site on an average of 1,000-1,500 stories/content per day.

4) I’ve seen people around the internet refer to Digg’s interface as a combination of Delicious and Slashdot’s best features. Would you agree?

• Digg is quite different from these sites in that our basic value is very simple: using the collective wisdom of the mass Internet audience to vote on which Internet content they believe other people should see.
• Slashdot is put together by an editorial board of a few people who sift through stories and decide what is worth placing on the home page. Digg, on the other hand, uses the masses, and therefore has no bias, and is completely transparent.

5) Do you view Slashdot as a competitor? What about sites like Shoutwire, Reddit, and Tailrank? Are these sites innovators or imitators?

• We don’t view Slashdot as a direct competitor, as we both do very different things and serve different purposes. We always keep an eye on competition, some are direct clones, and some are creating innovative new features.

6) How has Digg influenced journalism?

• I like to think of it in terms of how digg has influenced how people get their news and other content of interest. In that sense, digg has further leveled the playing field between traditional news media and bloggers and other non-traditional sites.

• Digg has a very symbiotic relationship with the news media. Perhaps what we will provide organizations like newspapers is some insight into what the mass audience really wants to read about today, at least the on-line Internet audience. It could change what newspapers write about.

7) Do you think Digg changed the way people blog?

• I honestly believe that the blogging phenomena will continue its strong growth with or without digg. We’ve just made it easier for the blogs with the best content to quickly be recognized by a large group of users.

Can you go into detail about Digg’s method for how stories get voted onto the main page?

• Once a story is submitted by a user, it is instantly posted in the digg area queue. This is a temporary holding place where stories wait to be promoted to the homepage. To help promote stories to the homepage, users visit the digg area and digg stories they like. Once a story has received enough diggs, it is instantly promoted. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or is reported, it eventually falls out of the digg area queue.

9) Digg has commented that it plans to expand beyond the technology-based categories it currently concentrates on. Can you comment on what categories will be introduced and/or when this will happen?

• Digg plans to expand into a variety of other areas, including science news, political news, etc. In this sense, we will be developing new areas for digg that will be similar to sections of a newspaper. Also, the concept behind digg isn’t limited to news. That’s about all we can say now, but look for some of these new sections in the next couple of months in addition to some new functionality and tools.

10) What are some notable examples of the “Digg Effect”?

• We’ve heard of several cases where digg has directed a large amount of traffic to sites with popular content. In some of these cases, it has caused servers to crash. Every once in awhile digg will receive the reverse digg effect. Digg stories will break before traditional news organizations, Google and Yahoo! will crawl us, and then digg will receive an onslaught of traffic due to the high search engine rankings.

11) Does Digg have a business model?

• Absolutely. Right now we’re driven by Google AdSense ads. We feel pretty strongly about not bombarding users with ads, so we’re trying to be as non-invasive as possible.

12) What does Digg plan on doing with its recent infusion of venture capital?

• Primarily investing in the infrastructure required to scale the immense growth of the site and hiring the personnel to manage the site and the company.

13) Are there improvements would you like to see implemented in a future Digg site redesign? Digg Spy?

• You’ll be seeing digg expand out of the tech news category. You will also see a lot more tools on the site. Users will gain a lot more real time visibility into what’s happening on digg. As interest shifts from one story to another, as groups of users move around the site, you’re going to see that in Digg Spy, which has quickly become one of the most popular features of the site.

14) How did you come to be involved with the Digg project?

• Digg started in September 2004 as a personal project. At that time, I was working at TechTV and I always had interesting side projects that I was running out of the house. I was a big fan of MacRumors.com and how some of their “Page 2″ stories that didn’t quite make the home page, were still really interesting. That got me thinking about all the great content out there that no one could see. That’s really where I started thinking about how it would be cool to give that control back to the community. So, digg really started out as a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote content without the external editorial control. After a very short time, we realized that we were on to something, as digg was becoming a great resource for breaking news stories, sometimes even before traditional media.

15) Is the Digg team working on any non-related side projects?

• No, we’re entirely focused on digg and make the site even better.

16) How do you see social news promotion evolving over the next year? Over the next five?

• I think the concept of giving users more control is immensely powerful. I really see the social content idea growing from its roots in technology news to many other subject areas of broad interest as well as very specified niches or communities of interest in a particular subjects. In the future digg will become a lot smarter. If you have been digging stories about oolong tea and AMD microprocessors digg will know that and be able to suggest relevant stories and friends based on your past digging preferences.

Source: HERE