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.
LONDON--Perhaps it's fitting that Digg founder Kevin Rose chose the Future of Web Apps conference here as the place to elaborate on his company's international expansion strategy. London, after all, has become the San Francisco-based Digg's biggest hub of user activity. But with headlines dominated by financial disasters, life gets a little more complicated for a company determined to build up and keep hiring.
CNET News caught up with Rose shortly after his presentation on Thursday morning. Here's the first part of our two-part interview.
You're a geek hero. You've got a huge following. How much do you want to be "the Digg guy," especially as Digg is expanding and moving beyond its roots?
Rose: Well, I absolutely love my job. It doesn't feel like I'm working, ever, so that's a nice place to be in when you've spent the last four years feeling like you don't have a job and it's just something you enjoy doing every day. So I don't think that's going to get old for quite some time. I'll be at Digg for a while.
Digg founder Kevin Rose, who has since gotten a much shorter haircut.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)So what about being such a cult figure (as host of the Diggnation podcast)?
Rose: There's a lot of people that watch our podcast, and enjoy our podcast and say, hey, you know, you guys are funny because we get there and drink beers and comment on our favorite technology and geek-culture stories, so there's that group of people who enjoy what we do as far as making the podcast. I don't know, I'm just happy that people watch and that people enjoy what we're doing. Alex (Albrecht, Diggnation's co-host) and I, when we started the podcast, we really didn't have any idea how many people were going to be into it. We were just, like, "Hey, we used to work together at TechTV, why not just do something fun and hit record?" Even if nobody watches we'll still continue to do it because we like hanging out.
You said earlier this morning that Digg's going to focus on expanding its appeal, that right now only a tenth of Digg's visitors have registered for user accounts. Is Diggnation going to change, too?
Rose: No, Diggnation will always stay the same. It's just kind of a fun show. Only a small percentage of the people who watch Diggnation actually go to Digg, there's only about 250,000 people per week that watch Diggnation, and Digg has millions and millions of people. So it's not like they're really closely tied together.
You said you're going to stay at Digg for a while. You just raised a big Series C round. Does this mean the company's going to stay independent (i.e. not get bought) for longer than originally planned?
Rose: The nice thing about the last raise is that it wasn't, like "oh, we're out of money, we need to raise more," it was more based on the fact that we knew we wanted to expand into different languages and we knew we had to buy racks of servers over in Europe, and all that takes capital to make happen.
We sat down and said, okay, where do we want to be a few years from now and what are the resources that we need to make that happen? We would've ran out of cash had we executed on that plan to expand internationally. That raise was really, okay, let's build the team that we need in San Francisco to continue to evolve the product, and invest in R&D and continue to scale the site, but at the same time let's talk about international next year. So that's what this is for.
What about other social news sites? Are any of them doing things that Digg isn't that you're hoping to emulate in one way or another?
Rose: That's a good question. I really don't use anybody else's product. I've never used their services at all, I think I've maybe "buzzed" one article when (Yahoo Buzz) first came out. We don't really base our product decisions on what anybody else is doing.
But there's been no instance where you saw something really cool and wished you'd thought of it first?
Rose: I've seen some really interesting mashups of other peoples' data that are really fun to play around with, and I've thought it would be really cool to see what Digg data looks like with that, but I can't think of any one feature. I think some of the stuff that StumbleUpon is doing with their toolbar and providing recommendations in the toolbar is really interesting to us, but not right now. We have a very basic toolbar right now today.
How has the current financial situation changed things at Digg? That stuff really started to unfold right after you raised your Series C round.
Rose: Nothing's changed. One of the nice things about Digg is we've always run fairly lean. We have a small team and we're a very text-heavy site, so as far as bandwidth is concerned it's not like we're YouTube spending a million dollars a week on bandwidth. For us it's just always being conscious of who we're hiring and why we're hiring them, and do we need that person or not. We won't be a 400-person company in a year or two years. It's just picking the spots where we need some help and growing slowly, and staging that growth so it mirrors our own Web traffic growth...it's always been out of necessity.
Are you anticipating a traffic drop after the election?
Rose: We don't anticipate that, no. That's a good question though...we've always seen traffic grow month over month. We're fortunate enough to be in that position, and we've seen the different bumps as little things that come along. When the Olympics was going on we saw a little bump ther. When there's big tech news or Apple events you always see bumps there. We'll have to see. We haven't really done any estimates on that.
LONDON--Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It's time to grow up.
"We have to do better," he said in his talk, called "The Future of News," and said that it's time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. "Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?"
Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, but Rose said that the site only has slightly over three million registered user accounts--those are the people actually "Digging." That indirectly confirmed what Digg critics hve been saying all along: that it's reflective of only a tiny and vocal subset of the Web, resulting in a heavy bias toward anything iPhone, anything Linux, anything Barack Obama, and plenty of wacky local news stories.
As a result, Rose explained, Digg's strategy going forward--one of the reasons why it raised $28.7 million in a Series C round last month--is to make the service more relevant to the average user. Digg has started to experiment with personalization and recommendation, something that Rose frequently discusses in his town hall Webcasts with the company's CEO, Jay Adelson. Introducing a "similar users" feature on the "upcoming" page of Digg increased friend adding fourfold and Digging by 40 percent.
Rose, who has ditched his trademark shaggy coif for a more mature buzz cut, didn't actually talk much about the future of news beyond Digg, but implied that he hopes Digg will be an industry example for the ongoing evolution of something much broader. He also didn't say anything about the pressures of an unfriendly economic climate, but his down-to-business attitude suggested that he realizes things aren't just fun-and-games for Web 2.0 anymore.
The impetus right now, he kept stressing, is to make a social news site personally relevant.
Digg has a lot of data that it hasn't opened up yet, and that it will start rolling out to the public to make the site more relevant for average people. Pooling users into "dynamic" groups by interest is paramount, as is customizing the site for people who might not want all those stories about iPhones and Barack Obama. Beyond that, there's more: Digg has used internal algorithms to identify what Rose calls "prescient users," or tastemakers who have a high probability of Digging something early on that will eventually become very popular.
One person in the audience asked Rose whether catering to uber-niche interests will actually be a negative force for Digg's young users, narrowing their worldview. Again, Rose said that the expansion of the site will provide all kinds of opportunities: filtering Diggs by regions of the world, for example. Internationalizing the site, on that note, is also a big goal, and should start to roll out late next year. And though the site now relies on its display ad contract with Microsoft, "Diggable ads" in some form will eventually help Rose's company make a few extra bucks.
But Rose, a bona fide geek hero, assured the audience--a crowd of developers mostly from the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, many of whom looked like they were young enough to be skipping school for the conference--that Digg won't lose its wacky-news cachet as it matures and expands.
"We truly believe the front page of Digg will always be that random (and) crazy," Rose said. "We don't want to get rid of that."
(Credit:
twentyfour)
The coolest after-dark attractions just have to be across the pond, don't they? I'm drooling over screenshots of Twentyfour, which looks pretty darn awesome (though who knows what the crowd's like). With over a thousand LED color combinations available, this is one place where the decor won't get boring--and did I mention the walls are actually projection screens?
The video walls kind of remind me of the Nokia flagship store in Manhattan, but from what it sounds like, they're a lot more functional. Bar patrons can control, or even contribute their own scenery somehow--I should point out that this could get bad if alcohol's involved, you know, "You bloody wanker, why did you put the rainforest scene up there again?" Some of the projections are even interactive, responding in one way or another if you touch them or hold your drink up to them ("Ooh, the fish swim toward my martini!")
(Credit:
twentyfour)
Here's the part I like the most--lay a hand on the bar, and it'll alert the bartender that you need another drink. Those of us used to crowded urban nightspots where it can take a full ten minutes for the bartender to even notice your existence can attest to the gravity of this breakthrough.
More photos at Geeksugar.
(Credit:
Londonist)
Generally, when we hear about London nightclubs stateside, it's because Prince Harry was spotted dancing on a table in a sarong or because some flashy playboy racked up a ridiculous tab. This time, however, it's a little bit different. The Camden Town boite Koko has introduced a new high-tech system to keep tabs on partygoers who leave the club for smoke breaks. Upon leaving the establishment, their fingerprints are scanned; they're then allowed seven minutes to enjoy their cigs, and then afterward must re-enter by re-scanning. Makes the bouncer's job a whole lot easier, I'm sure.
Those Brits sure do come up with some innovative nightlife tech.
I'm not a smoker, but I'm familiar with the need to briefly leave a noisy nightclub in order to make a cell phone call and then attempt to regain access without waiting in line all over again, and I think fingerprint scanners show promise. Londonist thinks it's a tad "unnecessarily draconian," but if it replaces those impossible-to-wash-off hand stamps, I'll take it.
Nothing like walking into a Friday morning meeting with the remnants of a "21+ OPEN BAR THURSDAYS" streak on your hand. Let's just say it's not exactly the best way to express to your boss that you might be a little bit out of it that day.
(Credit:
Dom Perignon)
Larry Ellison aside, those Middle Eastern businessmen sure do put Silicon Valley to shame when it comes to extravagant displays of opulence. Typically, we don't get names to accompany the tales of pimped-out Airbus A380s and the like, but generally the price tags speak for themselves. My favorite new "oh my gosh, I can't believe how much cash that guy spent" story was covered in the British press earlier this week: a band of partiers, led by an anonymous Dubai cash cow, spent a total of $210,000 at the posh London nightclub Crystal last Saturday night. With tax and gratuities, the final bill was more like $218,000.
To put things into perspective, that's the equivalent of about 360 8GB iPhones.
According to representatives from the nightclub (where apparently Prince Harry likes to booze it up on occasion), the evening started off innocently enough. The party of 18 people started with a bottle of pinot grigio that cost a paltry $50, but ultimately went through absurd amounts of champagne and vodka that included a $20,000 bottle of Dom Perignon. Also included in the bill were six Cokes, 17 orders of Red Bull, and eight bottles of the luxury-brand Voss water.
ABC News reports that the tab was closed at 4:24 AM. In other news, the $2 bottles of wine at Trader Joe's still get a thumbs-up from me.
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