NEW YORK--You had two options if you wanted to hang out with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Web 2.0 Expo conference this week: head over to the lobby bar of the trendy Standard Hotel on Monday night, where Digg was picking up the tab for several dozen of the city's blogger elite; or pack into Manhattan Center Studios on Tuesday night along with about a thousand other young, predominantly male New Yorkers for a live taping of Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht's "Diggnation" video show.
Geek heroes: Jay Adelson (left) and Kevin Rose in a screenshot from one of their regular 'Digg Dialogg' videocasts with Digg users.
Those are, after all, the two Diggs. There's Digg the company, the name that first put "social news" into the mouths of New York media both old and new, the BusinessWeek cover story that established the shaggy-haired Rose as digital media's poster boy, the start-up that was once talked about as a huge acquisition target for the likes of Current Media, News Corp., and even Google amid CEO Jay Adelson's coy insistence that it wasn't for sale. But then there's Digg the brand: haven for the wackiest of the Web, with a front page dominated by anything Apple, oddball science, insidery tech and politics news, and the latest YouTube sensations. It's a dual identity that seems to be tough for the industry, or the five-year-old company itself, to reconcile.
At the Web 2.0 Expo, both Diggs--and the tension between them--was on full display in a dual keynote by Adelson and Rose on Tuesday afternoon. And the executives were both vocal about the fact that Digg has got to change.
"We're about 40 million users today, (with) about 20,000 submissions a day going into the Digg system," Adelson said onstage. "It's certainly achieved huge things for us. It's what we've set out to do, but we have a ways to go."
Rose added, "We've pretty much stayed the same over the last couple years."
There's a revamped Digg coming, a complete overhaul using the Cassandra database management system, which was developed and then released as open source by Facebook. In the new version will be "instant Digging" that doesn't require registration or a login, better filtration of topics to fit any number of niche interests, and a "smarter" way to gauge story popularity so that both the number of "diggs" and the number of times a link was submitted in the first place are taken into account.
Adelson told CNET later on Tuesday, just outside the auditorium where hundreds of rowdy young Diggers were awaiting Rose and Albrecht to walk onstage for the live Diggnation taping (a co-production of Revision3, the video outlet that Rose and Adelson also co-founded), that this will arrive in the first half of next year. "I can't say with certainty when, because there are so many infrastructure components that have to come first," he said.
This talk of change and versatility is exactly the message that the San Francisco-based Adelson and Rose want to convey while they're visiting New York, the center of the global publishing industry. This is Digg the media company on parade, the Digg that picked up the tab for the cocktail-swilling media insiders at the Standard on Monday night; and this is the Digg that's taken a bit of a beating recently. True, its traffic isn't plummeting, and by most measures continues to grow at a decent pace, but as a news-sharing destination it's been eclipsed by both Facebook and Twitter.
Digg's once-gossiped-about valuation may have taken a hit simply because the market for social news has grown so saturated, and as a result the company is no longer a novelty. Take third-party Twitter app TweetMeme, for example, which takes the links shared all over Twitter in "retweets," and compiles them into something that looks an awful lot like Digg. Or the likes of Yahoo Buzz, which haven't proven to be as popular or ubiquitous as Digg but which proved that it's not particularly difficult to build your own social news service.
"It makes me very proud," Jay Adelson said of the Digg influence evident in TweetMeme buttons and, now, Facebook sharing buttons. He added, "I think that the sophisticated publisher understands the difference between sharing within a social network, sharing on Twitter, and sharing on Digg."
Influential, sure. But when it comes to making a lasting footprint in the media world, Digg hasn't yet been able to get past the common wisdom that the footprint in question will be from a beer-soaked Converse All-Star. And that's the Digg that was showcased on Tuesday night as Rose and Albrecht, both in trendy fitted plaid shirts, received a rock-star welcome for Diggnation.
More than a thousand people had showed up at the Manhattan Center Studios venue, a smaller crowd than the show's last taping in New York, but a company rep pointed out that the previous taping had been in the summer, and this one was on a school night. Someone in the audience excitedly waved a sign that said "WINDOWS 7 FTW!" (That's "for the win," in case you stepped in late.) Another sign read "I SKIPPED CLASS FOR THIS!" and still another, which Rose and Albrecht seemed especially proud of, was a green sign that read "GO HIPPIE!" with a massive, hand-drawn marijuana leaf.
Adelson says that the company's merry band of fanboys--yes, most of them are male--doesn't get in the way, strategy- or image-wise.
"Our core Digg enthusiasts frankly provide a tremendous amount of our feature ideas and feedback, and are the ones that we can count on to be there even when we screw up," Adelson told CNET on Tuesday night. "I don't think they hold us back. I think that's the power of the product."
Kevin Rose's essential Diggnation props: Mac laptop, open bottle of beer
(Credit: Revision3)There have been some good signs. Adelson says that Digg's experimental advertising system, in which unpopular ads are penalized with higher costs ("We charge the advertisers more money when their ads start sucking," Rose explained in the Web 2.0 Expo keynote) have been a runaway success. The company also absorbed a Rose side project, Twitter directory WeFollow, which could have interesting implications.
Their mission is still precarious. The hordes of Digg loyalists propelled the company to fame, but they're known to be volatile: if they hate something, they'll make it obvious. In 2007, when Digg pulled down a number of news links in response to a cease-and-desist complaint (the links directed to instructions for cracking a digital rights management code in the now-defunct HD DVD format), avid users flooded its system with even more links to the code. Digg admitted defeat, and restored the censored links. Earlier this year, when a new URL-shortening feature called the DiggBar garnered a negative reaction, the company made some significant modifications. If they don't like the yet-to-be-unveiled Digg revamp, it could get really ugly.
But perhaps the most difficult part of Digg's dual-identity wrangling is the fact that the company's executives and figureheads really do seem to have an affinity for its mischievous roots. Take Tuesday night, when a few excited audience members at the Diggnation taping started waving around the pink tickets they'd received from local cops for downing booze while waiting in line outside to see the show.
"Open container in line? That is awesome!" Rose exclaimed, reaching for one of the tickets and displaying it in front of the crowd.
Co-host Alex Albrecht chimed in. "You should get that framed!"
Spot the Facebook sharing button on Cracked.com
(Credit: Facebook/Cracked)Web publishers and blog owners have a new toy to play with: Facebook announced Monday that it has launched new "share" buttons with counters, much in the manner of Digg's iconic buttons and the third-party TweetMeme app for Twitter sharing.
Plus, there's more: Publishers installing Facebook share buttons can also get data back related to how many times that link has been shared, how many users have hit the thumbs-up "like" button or commented on shared versions of the story on Facebook, and how many people have clicked back to it through Facebook.
These Facebook "share" buttons had existed before, and the company said that more than 2 billion pieces of content are shared per week. But this is the first time that the counter and analytics have been available.
A post on the Facebook developer blog explains: "Anyone can add the Share button to their website with little to no technical experience, and style the button from a variety of options." Accessing the analytics however, requires a bit more coding know-how.
This could spell bad news for Digg, as Facebook's significantly bigger and more mainstream audience could make it a far more appealing choice for site owners that would prefer to display one prominent sharing button rather than two. As for Twitter, it doesn't actually own the app that powers the "retweet" buttons. A move like this from Facebook, however, could push it to think a bit harder about a partnership or acquisition--or hasten progress on that "retweet API" it has in the works.
Related speculation: When are we going to see a "most-shared" ranking from Facebook? That's when Digg's execs would really have to start sweating.
Social-news site Digg has ended its advertising partnership with Microsoft more than a year before the deal was set to expire. Instead of relying on Microsoft as its exclusive ad partner, Digg will now primarily use the internal sales force it recently began building; Microsoft will handle remnant inventory.
"Starting July 1, Microsoft will sell network inventory for Digg through the Microsoft Media Network, which it has been doing successfully for the last year and a half," a statement from Microsoft read. "Digg has created its own internal sales executive team, and we respect their decision to sell their owned-and-operated site inventory directly to help further accelerate their growth as a company."
Digg's contract with Microsoft, intended to be a three-year deal, started in mid-2007, when the company chose it over Google. At the time, founder Kevin Rose applauded the decision because it would let Digg's employees focus on feature development while leaving ad sales to a more experienced team.
The revised contract is a blow to Microsoft, which touted the Digg deal as a big victory at its debut. But it also is yet another signal that advertising on the Web is changing significantly.
According to a ClickZ report, Digg's internal sales team will focus on "custom, non-IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) inventory combined with standardized banner ads." This strategic decision--to move away from a reliance on the traditional IAB display units that have defined digital advertising for years--comes at a time when the best way to advertise on a social-media site is a matter of debate and uncertainty.
Social network Facebook also has a display ad contract with Microsoft (in addition to a $240 million investment) but has been putting more emphasis on the experimental "Engagement Ads" product that it packages and markets in-house. The News Corp.-owned MySpace, meanwhile, relies more heavily on traditional display ads.
By most accounts, MySpace is ahead of Facebook in the monetization game. It has a bigger foothold in the United States, where ad dollars are easier to come by than overseas, and it's willing to make advertising significantly more pervasive with full-page "wrap" campaigns--not to mention the fact that it has News Corp.'s media connections.
But with Digg choosing to go the Facebook route (sort of), especially given the bleak advertising climate, this could be a sign that more players in the tech industry have started to regard the next generation of digital ads as a more profitable route.
"It's not unusual for someone in the social media space to have a lot of custom units, because they're forging new territory," said Debra Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. "A lot of people say that by the time the IAB comes out with a standard, the ad format is, (while) not necessarily passe, certainly not the cutting edge."
Williamson noted that not only is Digg changing its ad focus, it's looking to make new hires to expand its team. "That does put a stake in the ground, and it does say that a company like Digg is serious about looking beyond the banner, so as to speak, that they're really looking to develop new ways of advertising and that they're looking to bring on new people to help them do that."
Whether or not Madison Avenue will agree is a different story.
This post was expanded at 1:15 p.m. PT.
Kevin Rose, flesh-and-blood iPhone rumor factory
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)AUSTIN, Texas--So the real star of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival has been Apple's iPhone. For better or for worse.
Facebook's big announcement at the annual geekstravaganza, for example, was that its Facebook Connect log-in product would be coming to the iPhone. Most of the products debuting in conjunction with the festival, including location-based mobile apps like Whrrl and FourSquare, are partially or entirely iPhone-centric. And if you happen to be a poor, unfortunate BlackBerry or Treo user, you may get some disapproving looks when you whip your handset out of your pocket around some judgmental SXSWi-goers.
It's not particularly surprising. This is, after all, the first SXSWi since the debut of the iPhone 3G. While the original iPhone was an instant hit, plenty of people in the tech industry (myself included) held out for the second generation because the first didn't have 3G data access or GPS capabilities. Not to mention there's now the App Store, which has meant the iPhone is a huge priority for developers and designers everywhere.
But on the flip side, there has been such a saturation of iPhones at SXSWi that the network for AT&T, the exclusive carrier for iPhones, promptly floundered (or, to use the geek slang of choice, "fail-whaled"), with conference-goers encountering poor service, weak Internet connections, and dropped calls left and right. iPhone problems were so prevalent that AT&T upped its coverage in Austin for the duration of the festival.
"To accommodate unprecedented demand for mobile data and voice applications at SXSW, we are actively working this afternoon to add capacity to our cell sites serving downtown Austin," a statement from the telecom giant read. "These efforts are ongoing, but we anticipate that customers should see improved network performance this evening and for the remainder of the event. We will continue to monitor network performance throughout the event, and will do everything possible to maximize network performance throughout."
Ouch.
The iPhone's ubiquity at SXSWi is especially fitting because on Tuesday, the final day of SXSWi, Apple itself will be making some kind of iPhone software unveiling.
The Apple announcement, in the company's hometown of Cupertino, Calif., will be far, far away from the bars and barbecues of Austin. But word travels fast here, and speculation has already reached a fever pitch. On Saturday night, during a live taping of his Diggnation podcast, Digg founder Kevin Rose said he anticipates copy-paste functions to come to the iPhone for the first time, and the geek press went wild.
Granted, Rose typically tapes Diggnation with a healthy amount of beer in his system, and he likely wanted to drop a couple of zingers to satisfy the hundreds of excited fanboys who were surrounding the stage with cameras in hand.
But it's about time for copy-paste. And I already feel bad for any SXSWi panelists and speakers who happen to be presenting at that time. As soon as word gets out about Apple's announcement, they'll probably lose the attention of their audiences altogether.
Ashton Kutcher
(Credit: Andrew Mager/CBS Interactive)
What a pairing: Hollywood slacker-hottie icon Ashton Kutcher and Silicon Valley slacker-hottie icon Kevin Rose have teamed up to create 24 Hours at Sundance, a Web-based reality show set at the eponymous film festival in Park City, Utah, later this week.
Backed by mobile live-streaming start-up Qik, the competition-focused show will pit four "social media mavens" against one another for 24 straight hours as they complete a set of challenges surrounding the annual film festival and broadcast them via Qik software on Nokia handsets. Rose (best known for founding Digg) and Kutcher, the Dude, Where's My Car actor whose production company Katalyst Media has created a Web show called Blah Girls, will co-host.
The four "social media mavens" are VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall, gadget blogger Meghan Asha, Konsole Kingz founder CJ Peters, and video blog personality Irina Slutsky.
"I kind of feel like there's been a trend in entertainment in general that moves toward a more visceral, more live experience," Kutcher told CNET News. "We have an idea of what we want to happen, but who knows what's actually going to happen."
Kevin Rose
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)"I don't think I've ever heard of anything else that's been done like this before, especially with the real time nature," Rose added. "It's only a matter of time before people in Hollywood and just everyone in general wants to participate and have a way to live-stream and connect with people they care about." Well, maybe not everyone.
From what it sounds like, dot-com culture geeks may find this fairly amusing. Kutcher told CNET News that one of the challenges will involve tracking down and interviewing dot-com icon Jason Calacanis, who will be present at Sundance. The Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo founder relocated to the L.A. area several years ago and has started to get a foothold in the Hollywood scene.
"It's unbelievable, it's like him versus (Robert) DeNiro for roles," Kutcher joked of Calacanis, who played himself in last year's film August, which chronicled a failing fictional dot-com. "It's getting out of control."
This post initially misstated Digg's 2007 loss as reported by 'BusinessWeek.' The company reported lost $2.8 million in 2007.
There are some stunning numbers in BusinessWeek about social news site Digg: In 2007, the company reportedly pulled in only $4.8 million in revenue and lost $2.8 million. In the first three quarters of 2008, it lost $4 million on $6.4 million in revenue.
Digg declined to comment on the numbers.
This is a little bit disconcerting, if true. Digg has been one of the hottest start-ups in Silicon Valley's hype machine for the past few years, due ironically in part to an August 2006 BusinessWeek cover story depicting boyish founder Kevin Rose giving a grin and a thumbs-up. (What innocent days those were!) It's also been vocally committed to growth, and has said that it's still hiring in the midst of the current recession.
(Credit:
BusinessWeek)
When Digg raised its last round of funding--a $28.7 million Series C in September--rumors pegged its valuation at around $164 million. That's significantly lower than the $200 to $300 million that was occasionally talked about in those pesky acquisition reports.
Which, by the way, we haven't heard many of recently. It used to be, per the gossip mill, that either Google or News Corp. or Microsoft or somebody else was trying to nab it; Al Gore's Current Media reportedly offered $100 million in 2006 and was snubbed.
Digg has a wild cult following, and Rose's background as a TV anchor and popular "Diggnation" podcast have turned him into one of the Web's biggest celebrities. And its traffic, by all accounts, continues to grow steadily as Digg makes strides to expand its base beyond the geeky young newshounds who made its community famous.
CEO Jay Adelson says he's cracking down and now aims to make the company profitable in one year rather than two. Considering what BusinessWeek has dug up this time (pun completely intended), that could be a tough task.
Jay Adelson, CEO of social news company Digg, has used a BusinessWeek interview to attempt to quash those long-standing acquisition rumors. From what he said, Digg is not for sale.
"Now I am pressured to keep costs reasonable and focus more on the top-line revenue, which we really haven't done ever," Adelson said to BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante, saying that he now hopes to make the company profitable in one year instead of two.
Not for sale? Riiiiiight.
It's an old (ha) Silicon Valley maxim that any company is for sale, assuming the right buyer comes along and offers the right deal. What's likely is that Digg has come to realize that in this economic climate, it's not going to get the price that Adelson and founder Kevin Rose want.
Digg raised a whopping $28.7 million in Series C funding in September, which Adelson and Rose said would go toward fueling a major site expansion. The company didn't disclose a post-round valuation, but VentureBeat heard that it was only $164 million--significantly less than the $250 to $300 million prices that were oft-whispered about in Valley social circles.
Here's my theory: The longer Digg waits for the perfect bid, the longer it's in danger of having its valuation chipped away. The truth is, it's not very difficult for a site to institute a "social news" feature or other form of Digg-like interaction. Current Media, after Digg spurned an acquisition offer, built Current News and now aggregates user-picked stories into an hourly TV show. Yahoo built Yahoo Buzz, which can propel stories to the front page of its portal. Some Google users occasionally report seeing experimental features in which they can vote on search results. There are smaller ones, too: Reddit, which sold early to Conde Nast, is still alive and kicking. A start-up called Kirtsy puts a girlier spin on the Digg model.
Adelson even remarked to BusinessWeek that buying some of these smaller social news sites could help make Digg stronger, especially now since the recession may make some of them dirt-cheap. "There are Digg clones around the world in every country," he said to Ante. "I could go into those markets and clean up those sites. If I needed more capital to do a deal, I could probably do it."
That, honestly, wouldn't be such a bad idea. Digg's biggest problem isn't user activity--it has one of the most loyal and addicted audiences on the Web--but the fact that its core user base is very niche. It experienced a surge in political traffic as election season rolled on, but its core is geek news; hot topics right now are screenshots from the movie Wolverine and airborne laser weapons.
SAN FRANCISCO--There wasn't much time for Current Media, the cable news network co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, to recover from last week's election and its marathon live broadcast, infused with content from Digg, Twitter, and countless video bloggers.
On Friday, Gore was giving the final address of the Web 2.0 Summit, a few blocks to the west of Current's offices, at the Palace Hotel, and plenty of advertising and marketing types were in town for the occasion.
Since it's a media company partially dependent on ad and sponsorship revenues, Current seized the opportunity, inviting a selection of visiting Madison Avenue types over to its offices for a meet-and-greet lunch with a special appearance by Gore, who famously went from losing the 2000 presidential election to winning an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize.
That morning, things were bustling, as maintenance staff was streaming in and out the front door, filling the downstairs lobby with dining tables and potted plants unloaded from two trucks parked outside. At so many of the Bay Area's tech brands that had launched election coverage, promotions, or other tie-ins, the attitude was the same: Nice job. Now let's keep moving.
"I was even joking the other day that I kind of felt like I have a bit of postpartum depression," said Randi Zuckerberg, who, as Facebook's marketing director, handles the social network's political-outreach efforts. "It was such a long, drawn-out, exciting election, and now it's just over."
But even for Facebook, at the top of Silicon Valley's pecking order, there is a sense that a quick turnaround is needed. "I'm definitely looking forward to jumping right into some of the international politics, international elections," Zuckerberg said, reflecting the company's dramatic overseas expansion and hope to tap into the same election fever abroad through voting-outreach initiatives. Its efforts proved successful in the United States, with 15 million people over the age of 18 logging into the site last Tuesday.
What's current at Current Media
The story is different at a company like Current, which was dismissed by some at its 2005 launch as a long-shot experiment. For Gore's company, the 2008 election posed an important street cred test.
Current's office looks more like a perky dot-com circa 1997 than a news media network. The space hosted a coffee beanery in the city's manufacturing era and a finance start-up during the tech boom, it's now a cavernous, servers-and-wires-filled space with exposed brick walls, post-industrial pipes, and blaring monitors. For Election Night, the office was transformed into "an election nerve center," Current's resident digital guru, Robin Sloan, told CNET News on Friday morning. "We had the Twitter room, the Digg room, the election control room," Sloan explained in a bubbly staccato. "It was totally electric. I mean, manic."
Current's ambitious election coverage came with plenty of risks: the potential awkwardness of working with Digg, which Current had unsuccessfully tried to acquire in 2006, and Twitter, which has had problems just keeping its servers running properly. The coverage had been planned in a matter of weeks, too.
"The idea to plug in the Twitters didn't really occur to us until we saw the way that people were using Twitter during the (Democratic and Republican parties') conventions," Sloan said. "We ended up getting a sponsor for this Election Day thing three days before it actually went on TV--from Microsoft."
But he says the company considers it to have been a great success, despite some critics' revulsion at Current's decision to use turquoise and magenta for its electoral map instead of red and blue. "This was like transplanting Web DNA into a Web-slash-TV project. To me, that was one of the big successes."
Like Facebook, Current plans to keep up the momentum and use it elsewhere.
"The question is, as we sort of recover, what is the next cool live event that we can construct something around?" Sloan suggested, adding that Inauguration Day is an easy pick but that it would be nice to choose something nonpolitical. Current, a 400-person operation, doesn't currently do much live coverage, and it was not yet able to provide concrete statistics on viewership or Web traffic.
The aftermath at Twitter and Digg
The election left both Digg and Twitter, meanwhile, at an inflection point: for Twitter, the political frenzy was its biggest chance yet to jump from digerati cult fame into the mainstream; Digg needed to prove to some that it's a potential media industry powerhouse rather than merely a hub of nerdy boys voting up and down on Apple rumors and wacky top-10 lists.
They're still, for the most part, in Barack mode. Several days after the election, Digg founder Kevin Rose taped a "Digg Dialogg" interview with Gore, who also signed up for a Twitter account that week. On Thursday, Twitter's blog highlighted a video clip of talk show hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert talking about the start-up.
That frenzy will die down sooner rather than later. And it goes without saying that in these economic conditions, regardless of President-elect Obama's potential, pre-revenue companies like Digg and Twitter need to get cracking on the money issue. That's another reason why there just isn't much time to relish a post-election hangover.
Some start-ups that were heavily reliant on election-related traffic or contracts have been hedging their bets. Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post, for example, spent the past year not only churning out a firestorm of election coverage but also launching new areas of coverage that wouldn't see a big drop in visits after Election Day. And representatives from a number of Web application makers that were commissioned to make spiffy election widgets for big media companies told CNET News late last month that they have their fingers crossed that those contracts and connections will lead to more high-profile deals after the election.
But onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday, a few hours after he met with potential advertisers and marketers at Current's offices, Al Gore put forth a different argument for maintaining momentum: the election was a stellar demonstration of how the likes of Digg, Twitter, and Facebook can be used for social change, and these times are too pressing to step back and return to that blissful age of zombie-biting apps and snotty Digg comments on wacky news stories.
"I do think that it's worth looking at the advantages of redesigning and rearchitecturing the context within which the activities take place--in other words, World 2.0," Gore said. "When there are changes that are needed, there's no timidity about going out and trying to make them happen."
That post-election, mid-November vacation getaway? Sorry. Maybe there'll be better luck after the 2010 midterms.
After broadcasting live Twitters during the U.S. presidential debate, Current TV had to go one notch higher for election night.
The cable channel, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has partnered with both Twitter and social news site Digg for the evening of November 4, during which it will feature a "multimedia dashboard" with live messages from Twitter, headlines from Digg, and video from both Current and "video status update" start-up 12seconds.tv. In keeping with the network's young target audience, electronica act Diplo will be performing DJ sets throughout the night, too.
The funny irony is that Digg reportedly once walked away from a $100 million acquisition offer from Current.
"The new pace of democracy is real-time," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint release. "Current is helping Twitter amplify the opinions, news, and trends that matter right now. Together, we're influencing more than media--we're evolving conversation."
Election night on Current will also feature (naturally) commentary, projected results, and a state-by-state map. So it won't be all fun and games and Kevin Rose, y'know.
Digg founder Kevin Rose, in a photo taken at the last Future of Web Apps conference in Miami.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)LONDON--In the first part of our interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps conference, CNET News asked the Web start-up poster boy about everything from the company's Series C funding round to whether he's concerned about when those election stories stop rolling in.
In part 2, Rose got a little more specific: What would happen if Digg got hit with a stock-plunging news hoax? Will he be making acquisitions? And most importantly, does "digg" mean anything dirty in any foreign languages?
CNN had that big debacle with a user-submitted story, about Steve Jobs having a heart attack, which turned out to be fabricated. What's your policy for what happens if something gets "dugg" that isn't true and which could have a big impact on stock performance or elsewhere?
Rose: The good news is that we have a lot of people that are actively looking for that and who flag and bury content based on whether or not it's inaccurate. There's probably not a day that goes by that there isn't a piece of content flagged on the site as inaccurate.
Do you employ anyone to keep tabs on that?
Rose: No. This is all done by the masses. We're fortunate enough to have millions of people come to the site every day, and thousands of people vote. (They can say), "this is bad," and we can apply that tag to it. We'll display a little stamp that gives a warning that the community has flagged it as potentially inaccurate. We see that every single day.
If a company serves a takedown notice because something was dugg about them that isn't true, would you comply? In the past you've been very vocal about not interfering with the community.
Rose: We'll only take things down that we receive like DMCA cease-and-desists that come to us. Often it's something like that there's a link to a pirated copy of Photoshop. But normally that sort of thing gets buried on its own because users won't promote piracy directly...We get a few a month but it's never a big deal because it's usually just blatant piracy.
So talk about internationalization. It's coming late next year. As a bit of a hint, are there any countries where Digg is extremely popular and a language translation might make sense?
Rose: Well, London is our largest city overall. But outside of that, as far as different languages are concerned, there is demand from certain users coming in and writing to us, but we see a lot of Digg-type clone sites, and those are the ones that we kind of keep tabs on. So we say, OK, where are our competitors and how are they doing? There's a Spanish version of Digg, there's a German version of Digg that's called Yigg or something like that.
And they're unofficial, or do they use your API or anything like that?
Rose: They're unofficial. They do their own thing. And then there's also a Digg in Japan that has some traction as well. So we look at this stuff and we say, OK, what do we do? Do we open up a version of Digg out there? Do we acquire these companies? It's all stuff that we talk about and I think that where you'll see this expand first is a combination of both requests from users and where our competitors are starting to take off.
So you might acquire a smaller competitor?
Rose: Sure, potentially.
Would you look at all into "crowd-sourced" language translations that we're seeing on sites like Facebook and Hi5?
Rose: The translation, we don't have a ton of things that would need to be translated. It's not like we would be translating the U.S. submissions. It would be their own submissions and a whole separate engine running an instance of Digg outside of our own, but still connected so that you could go to the U.S. version of Digg and it would show up in your profile and everything. But yeah, I don't think we're that far along. Right now we're just looking at different areas and where we want to expand and the code that will be needed to make that happen. It's all stuff that we'll be doing over the next couple of months.
Do you have any offices outside of San Francisco now?
Rose: We have a small group of people. We have someone that's working for us in Scotland and also someone that's working for us in Amsterdam. No official Digg logo on the side of a building anywhere.
So do you have any plans to open more offices?
Rose: I'm sure, eventually.
When you expand internationally, you're not going to have to change the name of the site or anything? It doesn't mean anything offensive in any language?
Rose: Somebody told me it did in one language. I can't remember what it was.
Your talk today was about the future of news. How do you see yourself in the news industry as a whole, beyond the niche of social news?
Rose: I don't know that we do actually. I think we're just kind of that platform to level the playing field. We will never become a news publisher in any way, in that we won't produce our own content or host other peoples' articles. We'll always be kind of directing the flow of traffic.
When you expand into other countries and if you launch localized versions, are you planning to have to deal with governments that may not agree with Digg's views on freedom of information?
Rose: Absolutely. I think that we have always wanted to create a neutral, level playing field, and I would not be OK with changing that point of view when it comes to Digg. I'm not going to bend our rules when it comes to story promotion or our algorithms that look for a unique, diverse crowd of people thinking that something is interesting, and wouldn't allow anyone, any government to manipulate that. That might mean that we can't actively compete in some markets, but those are kind of our core principles, and those will never be compromised.
You were talking a lot about how you've got a ton of data that you haven't sourced out yet. Have you thought at all about adding an additional revenue stream by licensing analytics to clients?
Rose: Yeah, one of the big things that our business development team spends a lot of time working on is relationships with publishers. They're constantly coming to us and saying that (we) have a lot of data about their users--what they do, what they enjoy, where they're coming from, what other articles and other sites they're posting on--and it would be cool if we could get some of that data into a type of dashboard.
That's all things that we're looking at as far as tools for publishers, like some of the other things I mentioned today like a recommendation engine for publishers. It's definitely on the road map and it's stuff we want to develop, but it's just important that I'm not going to build a custom suite for CNN and not provide it to a blogger. I just want to make sure that when we do build a tool, it's available to everyone.
At this conference, there are a ton of young independent developers eager to learn. Given this financial climate, things are tougher when it comes to getting venture funding or getting a job. What would your advice to them be?
Rose: E-mail us at jobs dot digg dot com. (Laughs.) You're absolutely right in that I've talked to a lot of investors recently, some of our angels, a couple of VCs, that I know and communicate with, and it's definitely a weird time right now. Start-ups that don't have traction and don't have that kind of hockey-stick-like growth on Alexa or Compete or whatever are going to have a really difficult time raising an additional round of funding. I think that a lot of the advice going out there to start-ups right now is to pare back a little bit and get into a mode that you can survive in.
There's a way to, they call it, "raise an internal round" of funding just by cutting back on things that you don't absolutely need. Cut that out of the budget and it's like raising money because you're not spending it. I really unfortunately think that there's going to be a lot of start-ups that go by the wayside in the next 12 months. The advice I hear out there is that if you can raise money, now's the time to do it and then just put your head down for the next couple years. I know a lot of start-ups are trying to do that.
