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!"
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.
Digg has always made its message clear: it's not social news, it's democracy.
The company's executive team--founder Kevin Rose, and CEO Jay Adelson--thumbed their noses at the DMCA complaint they received when users "dugg" a crack code for the now-defunct HD DVD technology. They also decided to connect with their users through "town hall" events Webcast live four times a year. So it's perhaps fitting that for the company's third quarterly town hall, Rose and Adelson set up shop in the "Big Tent" new-media hall at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Digg is a "Big Tent" sponsor.)
It'll be following up with an event held in partnership with MySpace at the Republican National Convention. The company also kicked off a "Digg Dialogg" event series, in which executives ask users' questions to prominent guests. Adelson, who called it a "perfect alignment of Digg and elections," interviewed House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the inaugural interview, in partnership with CNN's iReport.
"They're your raw questions," Rose said, his characteristic mop-top haircut forsaken in favor of a buzz cut. "They were completely unfiltered."
To be fair, Digg owes a lot to politics--its energetic base of news hounds loves election coverage, and the national elections inevitably pull a lot of traffic to the site.
The questions were largely technical ones that dealt with the minutiae of Digg culture: Adelson said that the "shout" communication system will be tweaked to limit spamming and a private message system is on the way, better technology to flag duplicate stories ("I hate this!" Rose said on the problem with duplicate story submissions) is coming this fall, and Digg is working on a way to let members flag stories as "not safe for work."
Most of Rose and Adelson's answers, which they breezed through more quickly than with previous town halls due to time constraints on the Denver stage, fell into the niche of "good suggestion, and we're working on it."
One question asked if Digg could institute a forum for members. That was a more contentious point for the company executives. "We do want to have forums for our users to communicate and support each other," Adelson said, but added that he's working on matching up the authentication system so that it uses the same credentials as Digg itself rather than an external forum system.
Rose was less enthusiastic. "Everyone has forums and it's always the same crap," he said. "It doesn't necessarily mean that they're helping elevate the good questions and helping the conversation come through."
A few genuinely good ideas came up: one question suggested "geotagging" for stories to group them into local news stories, something that could make the site legitimately compete with sites like Outside.in and city blog networks like Gothamist. "Yes," Rose said. "We've thought about this as well and it would be really cool if we could start to group different events around you." Adelson added that Digg has "a few projects on the way...think 2009, realistically, for some of this stuff."
Despite the somewhat dull nature of many technical questions about recommendation engines and comment improvement, Adelson and Rose insisted that those are the questions they want to hear because it's where Digg users can really make a difference in shaping the site's direction. "It's really important to know what you guys are thinking. It keeps us honest," Adelson said.
The next Digg town hall will be held on November 6--two days after the U.S. presidential election. Its next meetup, however, will be off American shores: Rose will be taping his Diggnation podcast live from London on October 10.
Social news site Digg, a perpetual target of acquisition rumors, normally addresses the "is _____ buying you?" questions with a "no comment" answer. Not this time.
Jay Adelson, the company's CEO, posted a blog entry on Friday in response to a rampant rumor that Microsoft, Google, and two major media companies were placing bids on the hot start-up's price tag. A sizeable number of avid Digg users were thrown into panic mode over the prospect of a corporate parent. Adelson appeared to deny the rumors outright.
"Normally our policy is to not comment about things like this," Adelson wrote, "but this morning's rumors about a bidding war involving Google and Microsoft have created such a stir we feel compelled to tell you all directly that they are completely inaccurate."
He continued: "Sorry to burst any drama theories, but they aren't true. We remain focused on improving Digg and rolling out great features."
But Adelson could be acting a bit cagey here. The original report on TechCrunch never mentioned a "bidding war" per se, just that four companies were in the running to acquire the company. The "bidding war" phrase in Adelson's post could have referred to embellished rumors and speculation that subsequently floated about the Web. I've e-mailed Adelson to ask him to clarify whether he's willing to debunk the entire contents of the post.
I'll update this when I have a response.
On Monday night, social-news site Digg took a new approach to its famously clamorous users: CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose sat down in front of a Ustream-connected camera with their MacBook Pros and a couple of beers and answered questions that had been submitted by Diggers.
As a relative outsider to Digg culture, I was fairly dissatisfied.
All in all, the session highlighted quite a few of Digg's strengths as well as troubles going forward--and additionally reflected a few common criticisms about the site as a whole. But in the process, the questions were inward-focused, dealing with the demands of an active but demanding user base. Very few dealt with Digg's place in the Web's landscape or new media industry as a whole.
Digg, like a handful of other social-media sites (Yelp and Vimeo come to mind), has become famous for a notoriously tight-knit community. On one hand, that's a sign of success. It's got a really dedicated user base. On the other hand, it invokes claims of cliquishness and complaints that it's hard for an outsider to break in.
Watching the town hall, those complaints seemed pretty grounded. Right off the bat, the 20 questions selected were chosen because of the numbers of Diggs each question amassed in a thread about the town hall. True, that's keeping it in the community, and Digg is all about the community. But it's also a bit incestuous, and the questions could have fallen prey to Digg's alleged insideriness--voting up a comment or story simply because of who posted it or submitted it, not because of the content of the stories.
And consequently, the vast majority of the stories were about the nitty-gritty details of the site, the sort of thing that would be of importance to a daily Digg user but which would be inconsequential at best (and potentially nonsensical) to an outsider. I'm not a top Digger, but I'm more than familiar with the site. Digg's users, for better or for worse, also happen to be a tech-savvy bunch. That means a tougher job for Adelson, Rose, and the rest, as the users will be more likely to demand upgrades to the service, insist on a better user experience, and the like. That's good; I'm tired of seeing Web 2.0 sites thinking that they can get away with perpetual beta phases and poor performance.
But on the other hand, Digg can't simply look inward because legitimate competitors have begun to surface. One of them, Mixx, just raised several million dollars in venture funding. None of the questions addressed on Monday night dealt with Digg's opinion of its competitors, plan for moving forward in a tough economic climate, or where Rose and Adelson see the site in five years. Granted, that's not their fault; the questions about "super-users" and comment system upgrades were, after all, what the users Dugg. But I sat through question after question about minute upgrades to the Digg comment system when I really wanted to hear about Adelson and Rose's collective vision for the site going forward.
One question did touch upon the constant gossip that Digg will get acquired. For obvious reasons, Adelson and Rose declined to comment. "We get asked this every day," was Adelson's response. "We are laser focused on the features that users want us to do, and frankly that is what we're focused on as a business right now."
Digg does have a great model for social news that, in my opinion, hasn't yet been paralleled by any other site. But it's in a bit of a Catch-22: ignore or deceive its community, and it faces mass backlash; but pander to its community too much, and it hinders its opportunities for growth as it focuses too far inward. I wanted to hear vision. I wanted to hear partnerships and developments and possibilities. What I heard instead was the gradual upgrading of the search algorithm. Maybe, because I'm not a hardcore Digger, I just don't get it.
But I appreciate that Kevin Rose is a fan of Chimay Red ale.
Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson are, as many of you know, holding a "town hall" on Monday at 6 p.m. PT, streamed live via Ustream.tv.
Digg's user base is notoriously colorful, so this should be a popcorn-worthy occasion--that is, if you care about matters of editorial control, "gaming the system," comment moderation, and whether iPhone headlines are cooler than Linux headlines.
Digg CEO Jay Adelson (left) and founder Kevin Rose (right) with their MacBooks.
(Credit: Digg)All kidding aside, this will be a look into the workings and management of one of Silicon Valley's perpetual cool kids. (If you see an acquisition question, there's a chance that it comes from me.) Check back here for updates throughout the webcast, as well as analysis later.
7:12 p.m. : Question No. 20: Threads with a lot of comments are bogging down peoples' computers. This commenter wants a fix. Adelson says it's already in place.
Bonus questions: Rose's favorite beers? Chimay Red. "It's good stuff," he says. Kevin, have you ever tried Allagash White?
Live questions from audience: "Diverse diggers" rather than a homogeneous group--what are they, exactly?
"Diversity is about who, sort of where, questions like that? I can't get into any more detail," Adelson says ambiguously, and Rose talks about how Google goes into user interaction history and tracks queries. "We look into a lot of things and track a lot of stuff and we just want to make sure you're not trying to game us," Rose says.
Why are legitimate bloggers labeled as spammers? Adelson says they can be one and the same. Rose agrees. Adelson says it can be someone who submits every single one of their blog posts to Digg so that other users mark it as spam.
What does 'gaming' exactly mean? A whole lot of different kinds of schemes, the guys say. "It's insidious, the stuff that people do," Adelson says. Basically, it means manipulating the system. "They think it's going to generate revenue for their crap-ass site." Rose talks about how someone once hired a ton of people from Romania to Digg stories for him and the team was alerted to the high volume of Romanian IP addresses.
The guys won't comment about how they track down pay-per-Digg schemes.
And now it's done. Next town hall webcast will be May 28. Meetups in cities will be coming too, San Francisco on April 22; New York on June 17, and Kevin wants to do a live-from-New-York Diggnation then too; Chicago on July 23...
"Eventually, (for) these Webcasts there'll be an audience," Rose says. Soon after, they go back to their Anchor Steams.
7:03 p.m.: Question No. 15: Why not a way to see old comments?
Adelson remarks that it's really hot and that Rose is sweating a lot. Rose opts to answer the question and say it's coming in the new comments system, but Adelson says that it's already possible to "sort by comments" in profiles.
Question No. 16: I totally miss this one.
Question No. 17: Censorship issues and mysterious "auto-bury." Adelson and Rose assure they've already addressed it.
Question No. 18: Stale front-page content. "We want to get the best content in front of you as soon as possible," Rose says, assuring viewers that they're working on a way to streamline it so that the same stories don't just stick around.
Adelson talks about "a more customized experience of Digg," whether grouped by geographical location or interest, and then said that they can't make any promises but that they're thinking about that stuff. Yes, please! Then I won't see six zillion iPhone stories!
Rose says that if people want to be in Digg focus groups, they'll address it more in the next town hall next quarter.
Question No. 19: Better options to get upcoming stories on the front page? Maybe a random story? "You will see, in Upcoming, recommended stories," Rose says.
Adelson says "Don't say anything else" in response to Rose's tendency to say too much.
6:55 p.m.: Question No. 13 wants discussion about stories being removed by moderators. This has been a hot topic among avid Diggers, many of whom have seen this as a threat to their community-first mantra.
There is an admin on site at all times, Adelson says, but only to delete spam. Rose talks about a spammer who cleverly worked around normal spam controls in order to weasel his way into Digg by building up a reputation before switching to a sketchy spammy strategy.
Nearly 1,900 viewers on the stream, and my browser can only handle about a few seconds before the sound goes out and I have to pause and restart. I reload the video, which helps somewhat.
Question No. 14: Podcasts! What's up with the Digg podcast section? "It seems like it's been in beta forever, but that's very Web 2.0-ish," the questioner says.
"We noticed that even though we had a great system for ranking podcasts, that we had a lot of content...that was finding itself on the front page of Digg," Rose said. Basically, people weren't submitting podcasts as podcasts because they wouldn't wind up on the front page if they were in the podcast section. So they're going to scrap the podcast section and fold it into the video section, which does point to the front page.
They're promising more details about this decision.
6:46 p.m.Question No. 9: Bugs in profile pages. They have an engineer wave hello and say that the bugs will be fixed soon.
Question No. 10: A "remove all shouts" button instead of having to delete them one by one? "Continuing to work on ways to improve the shouts," Rose says.
Question No. 11: Wants to see the shouts system scrapped due to spam. Rose says they're working on a way to have more private communication rather than public, Facebook-Wall-esque ones.
Question No. 12: Why are stricter measures not in place so that "super users" game the "little guys" with their influence? It's a little more complicated than that, but Ustream is crapping out on me so much that I miss half the question.
"This is from our perspective totally against the spirit and the terms of the site," Adelson says. Guess it must be pretty nasty.
6:38 p.m.: Question No. 6: A user wants news about the new comments system, long-awaited among hard-core Diggers.
"The answer is April," Adelson says. Developers in the room groan. "We don't like to attach dates to things," Rose says. "Things can go wrong." More testing is necessary.
New on comments: changing votes on comments once you've made them, delete comments, display number of applies, new display type sorted by "best threads." And more. If you're not a hardcore Digg user, you probably won't care.
Oh, wait, it's Anchor Steam they're drinking, not Yuengling. My bad, I grew up near Philly, not San Francisco.
Question No. 7: Will you be able to delete your comments? Answer: yes.
Question No. 8: Are you for sale?
"We get asked this every day," Adelson says. "We are laser focused on the features that users want us to do, and frankly that is what we're focused on as a business right now."
"Ooh, you said laser," Rose says.
6:32 PM PT: Question No. 3: Wants a moderated Digg-user forum so that users can communicate with employees rather than have to submit questions to technical support.
Adelson: "Yes." Will create a variety of user forums.
Question No. 4: Wants Adelson and Rose to acknowledge the "new algo," also known as controversial moderations to the algorithm that determines what winds up on Digg's front page. "The algo seems to penalize people who use the site most," he says.
Clearly, many of these questions are really only of concern to hardcore Digg users.
"Remember that Digg has 25 million visitors come in a month," Adelson says. "It's diversity not just based on the same people issue, but...there's lots of things it's looking at about the way people Digg that's going into this, and that's all we can say."
"Once we detect enough diversity around a story, it goes on the front page," Rose adds.
Question No. 5: If people can see who dugg a story, why can't they see who buried (un-dugg) it?
"I'm open to the idea of transparent buries eventually," Adelson says, but they've held off because some people are very sensitive to being seen negatively impacting something rather than positively. At least that's what their focus groups say.
Rose didn't even like buries in the first place. "I didn't want people fighting," he said.
Adelson recommends the book The Wisdom of Crowds. Rose says data about buries will first show up on comments before it shows up on stories.
With around 1,630 viewers in the stream, Ustream's sound is dying on me more frequently. Darn bandwidth.
6:21 p.m.: Adelson denies the existence of a 'super-user' system in which hardcore users have more influence in the site's algorithm than other Diggers.
"When we look at other ways that people try to manipulate the system, we don't want a group of people to come in and just say 'I have the power to put anything on the Web,'" Rose says.
Adelson stresses that "buried" stories don't disappear from the site unless there is something like a DMCA complaint. Rose mentions the notorious HD DVD takedown scandal from last year and said that Digg aims for total transparency by posting the takedown notices, etc.
Adelson says you won't wind up on a reputed "Digg blacklist" unless you're really a spammer or breaking the rules. Mentions a "level playing field." Less than 25 percent of stories come from top 100 Diggers, he says.
Question No. 2: "Please fix the search. It is almost useless sometimes." Rose says the questioner is referring to duplicate stories that wind up on the site. Mentions a hardcore Digg engineer who's working on completely overhauling search for the site so that duplicate stories don't keep showing up.
Somebody hands Yuenglings to Adelson and Rose. Rose says, "I didn't want to drink tonight, but we can have a little sip."
Back to business. "We realize it (search and duplicate detection) is broken today," Rose says. Focusing on widgets doesn't mean they're ignoring the site's efficiency.
6:16 p.m.: Rose giving an update on where Digg is. Today: the iGoogle gadget came out, MySpace and Netvibes widgets. New features: revamped comments system coming. Recommendation engine under works, "a new way to explore stories and find cool stories even before they become popular and it takes a look at everything you've beein Digging throughout time and compares it to other users." (Rose)
This is where Ustream's servers start to fail me. The sound dies on me about every second and a half, and I miss the first question almost entirely--something about stories getting hundreds of diggs but not winding up on the front page. I switch browsers from Firefox to Flock, which gives me about 10 seconds before the sound craps out on me. Guess Ustream is a little stressed.
Adelson is talking about "auto-bury," which he says is not quite as conspiratorial as some users have suggested. It's really for spam control. Rose mentions a notorious Digg spammer called KoolaidGuy. "The last thing we want is for Digg to turn into a spam-hole," Rose says.
A balloon pops in the background. Oh, well, I guess these are Digg's offices.
6:21 p.m.: Adelson denies the existence of a 'super-user' system in which hardcore users have more influence in the site's algorithm than other Diggers.
"When we look at other ways that people try to manipulate the system, we don't want a group of people to come in and just say 'I have the power to put anything on the Web,'" Rose says.
Adelson stresses that "buried" stories don't disappear from the site unless there is something like a DMCA complaint. Rose mentions the notorious HD DVD takedown scandal from last year and said that Digg aims for total transparency by posting the takedown notices, etc.
Adelson says you won't wind up on a reputed "Digg blacklist" unless you're really a spammer or breaking the rules. Mentions a "level playing field." Less than 25 percent of stories come from top 100 Diggers, he says.
Question No. 2: "Please fix the search. It is almost useless sometimes." Rose says the questioner is referring to duplicate stories that wind up on the site. Mentions a hard-core Digg engineer who's working on completely overhauling search for the site so that duplicate stories don't keep showing up.
Somebody hands Yuenglings to Adelson and Rose. Rose says, "I didn't want to drink tonight, but we can have a little sip."
Back to business. "We realize it (search and duplicate detection) is broken today," Rose says. Focusing on widgets doesn't mean they're ignoring the site's efficiency.
6:07 p.m.: "We've been talking about it internally for quite some time," Rose says of the town hall discussions, which the company now hopes to hold quarterly, and adds that they're hoping to make them into live meetups soon. They could use the dialogue: over the past few months, Digg's all-about-the-community policy has come under question as rumors surfaced that editorial control over the social news site was tighter than previously though. "This is the first one. It's a little rough," Rose apologizes.
6:04 p.m. PT: They're sorting out the technical issues and doing mic checks. Adelson falsely introduces himself as Alex Albrecht, Rose's host on the Diggnation podcast. Rose quips, "You're much taller than Alex." Adelson says, "He is a little man.
6 p.m. PT: Here they are! Adelson is wearing stripes. Rose is wearing plaid. They hold up a whiteboard with townhall@digg.com written on it. (The sound is still turned off.)
This post has been updated with comment from Digg CEO Jay Adelson.
Valleywag reported on Wednesday afternoon that a "major media player" was close to plunking down $300 million to $400 million for social news site Digg. Valleywag editor Owen Thomas wrote that "a source rules out all the big Internet players--not Microsoft, not Google, not Yahoo, not News Corp.," and that CBS had "taken itself out of the running."
Thomas went on to speculate that perhaps the buyer for the Kevin Rose-founded Digg would be the New York Times Company or the Washington Post Company. Social news and bookmarking sites have indeed proven to be hotter buys for media companies rather than technology companies, with Conde Nast's acquisition of Reddit a year ago and Forbes' very recent purchase of Clipmarks--the exception is Delicious, which Yahoo bought.
This should be taken with more than a grain of salt--OK, an entire margarita's worth of grains of salt--but here's an interesting tidbit. I was talking to Digg CEO Jay Adelson at Tuesday night's Founders Club party, and he sure didn't say anything that hinted at an acquisition (obviously). But Adelson, who is a New York resident, did say that he wishes the company had a bigger East Coast presence.
Adelson told me in an e-mail on Wednesday afternoon that neither he nor Digg would be commenting on the acquisition rumor. But considering how many "major media players" are based in Gotham, this still could be saying something.
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