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Digg, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	San Francisco, California (December 5, 2004 (2004-12-05))[1]
Founder(s)	Kevin Rose
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Kevin Rose (Founder) Jay Adelson (CEO) Scott Baker (Operations Director) John Moffett (Finance Director)
Employees	71[2]
Website	digg.com

Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site's cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page. Digg's popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with story submission and voting systems.^[3]

Contents 1 History and description 1.1 Potential sale 2 Criticism 2.1 Marketing tool 2.2 AACS encryption key controversy 2.3 UPS Controversy 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

[edit] History and description

Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. All except Byrne currently play an active role in the management of the site. "We started working on developing the site back in October 2004," Rose told ZDNet.^[4] "We started toying around with the idea a couple of months prior to that, but it was early October when we actually started creating what would become the beta version of Digg. The site launched to the world on December 5, 2004." Rose's friend, David Prager (The Screen Savers, This Week in Tech), originally wanted to call the site "Diggnation", but Rose wanted a simpler name. He chose the name "Digg", because users are able to "dig" stories, out of those submitted, up to the front page. The site was called "Digg" instead of "Dig" because the domain name "dig.com" had been previously registered by the Walt Disney Internet Group. "Diggnation" would eventually be used as the title of Rose and Alex Albrecht's weekly podcast discussing popular stories from Digg.

The original design was free of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Ries. As Digg became more popular, Google AdSense was added to the website. In July 2005, the site was updated to "Version 2.0". The new "version" featured a friends list, the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a "success" page, and a new interface designed by web design company Silverorange.^[5] The site developers have stated that in future versions a more minimalist design will likely be employed. On Monday June 26, 2006 version 3 of Digg was released with specific categories for Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming as well as a View All section where all categories are merged. Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden increase of traffic to the "dugg" website. This is referred to by some Digg users as the "Digg effect" and by some others as the site being "dugg to death". However, in many cases stories are linked simultaneously on several popular bookmarking sites. In such cases, the impact of the "digg effect" is difficult to isolate and assess. Wordpress is especially known for its tendency to crash under the increased traffic.^[6] On August 27, 2007, Digg altered its main interface, mostly in the profile area. The domain "digg.com" attracted at least 236 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.

[edit] Potential sale

Several reports have come forward claiming Digg has been trying to sell itself to a larger company since early 2006.^[7] While Adelson claims that Digg will meet with any potential buyers, he denies that they will actively begin talks for a sale. The most recent sale talks were with Google in July 2008 for approximately 200 million dollars. On July 25, during the due diligence part of the potential sale, Google informed Digg that they were not interested in the purchase.^[8] As a result of Google's decision, Digg entered into a third round of funding, receiving $28.7 million from investors such as Highland Capital Partners. With this funding, the company plans to move from their current offices to accommodate a bigger staff base.^[9] On December 2, 2008, BusinessWeek reported "Digg Chief Executive Officer Jay Adelson says the popular news aggregation Web site is no longer for sale, and the focus of the company is to build an independent business that reaches profitability as quickly as possible. That means the four-year-old startup will dial back some of its expansion plans, instead prioritizing projects that generate revenue and profit".^[10] On December 18, 2008, BusinessWeek analyzed Digg's financial statements. They reported that Digg lost 4 million dollars on 6.4 million dollars of revenue in the first three quarters of 2008. ^[11]

[edit] Criticism

Digg has come under criticism for varying reasons. Most disparagements are centered on the site's form of user-moderation: users have too much control over content, allowing sensationalism and misinformation to thrive. ^[12][13] The site has also suffered the risk of companies paying for stories submitted to the site,^{[14][15][16][17]} similar to the phenomenon of company-attempted Google bombing. Other critics feel that the site's operators may exercise too much control over which articles appear on the front page as well as the comments on Digg's forums.^[18][19] Some users complain that they have been blocked from posting, and their accounts disabled, for making comments in the user-moderated forums that conflict with the personal interests of Digg's operators.^[20] The existence of the "bury" option has also been criticized as undemocratic and due to its anonymous nature, unaccountable,^[21] which often leads to expungement of criticism of hotbed topics that do not mesh with the prevailing view of the community, which has been characterized as liberal or left-leaning by some critics ^[22] and users.^[23] Another criticism in this area has been^[24] how a faulty or misleading article can reach many users quickly, blowing out of proportion the unsupported claims or accusations (a mob mentality). Certain Digg users have been accused of operating a "Bury Brigade" that tags articles with which they disagree as spam,^[13][25][26] thus attempting to bury stories critical of Digg. One commentator states that one of the site's major problems: "...is the ability of a small number of users to "bury" stories without accountability. Burying news is meant to help separate spam and inaccurate stories from the general morass of ordinary, viable stuff.

It has been reported that the top 100 Digg users posted 56% of Digg's frontpage content, and that a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage content.^[27][18] A few sites^[13] have raised the problem of groupthink and the possibility that the site is being "manipulated", so to speak. In response to this question, the site's founder Kevin Rose has announced an upcoming change to the site's algorithm:^[28] "While we don't disclose exactly how story promotion works (to prevent gaming the system), I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn't mean that the story won't be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be needed to deem the story homepage-worthy."^[29]

[edit] Marketing tool

Digg has become a very effective marketing tool for entrepreneurs. However, companies on social bookmarking sites have the image of an outsider, or a third party. Oftentimes, businesses are not in tune with the community surrounding social bookmarking sites and can alienate "friends" with incessant company news (aka spam). In order to function within the community, entrepreneurs need to follow social bookmarking etiquette--contribute, be honest, get involved. ^[30]

[edit] AACS encryption key controversy

Wikinews has related news: Digg.com suffers user revolt; Founder will not fight

On May 1, 2007 an article appeared on Digg’s homepage that contained the encryption key for the AACS digital rights management protection of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Then Digg, "acting on the advice of its lawyers", removed posting submissions about the secret number from its database and banned several users for submitting it. The removals were seen by many Digg users as a capitulation to corporate interests and an assault on free speech.^[31] A statement by Jay Adelson attributed the article’s take-down to an attempt to comply with cease and desist letters from the Advanced Access Content System consortium and cited Digg’s Terms of Use as justification for taking down the article.^[32] Although some users defended Digg's actions,^[33][34][35] as a whole the community staged a widespread revolt with numerous articles and comments being made using the encryption key.^[36][37] The scope of the user response was so great that one of the Digg users referred to it as a "digital Boston Tea Party".^[38] The response was also directly responsible for Digg reversing the policy and stating: "But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."^[39]

[edit] UPS Controversy

On March 27, an article titled, “BREAKING: UPS Announces It Will Stop Advertising on O'Reilly” was published by a community member on Digg. The story was linked to ThinkProgress, a liberal think-tank, which discussed how United Postal Service agreed to cease advertising on The Factor with Bill O’Reilly as a result of a campaign established by the ThinkProgress community to discourage ambush journalism by Mr. O’Reilly. ThinkProgress had started a campaign to inform Mr. O’Reilly’s sponsors regarding his information acquisition tactics with Amanda Terkel, a ThinkProgress editor. After several reports were filed by members to companies such as UPS, Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes, Audi, Johnson & Johnson, and other sponsors of The Factor, UPS released the following statement to ThinkProgress:

“Thank you for sending an e-mail expressing concern about UPS advertising during the Bill O’Reilly show on FOX News. We do consider such comments as we review ad placement decisions which involve a variety of news, entertainment and sports programming. At this time, we have no plans to continue advertising during this show.”

Upon hearing this information, the article was quickly dugg by over 4,100 members of the Digg community over the course of the weekend. Many members were quick to judge the statement by UPS and assumed that UPS had decided to stop advertising on The Factor as a result of the campaign. This stirred up a controversy between Fox News supporters and UPS prompting UPS to clarify their statement a few days later. On March 30, 2009 Susan Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for UPS, issued the following statement:

“We are writing to clarify our statement of last Friday because it appears to have been misinterpreted. UPS has not “pulled” any advertising from Fox News nor has the company taken a position on the “Think Progress” campaign. Our intent on Friday simply was to note that UPS does not have any pending advertising plans with the O’Reilly show.”

According to a press release to shareholders, UPS is currently considering legal action against ThinkProgress for its role in the spreading of false information and spam tactics.

Comments left by the Digg community revealed that a vast majority of Digg members started praising UPS in its original decision believing the decision to have been based on UPS siding with ThinkProgress. This became a clear indication of the lack of moderation on Digg by its operators. It also identified a weakness within the system for several members to promote a story without accountability, thus making Digg less credible. Digg has not released a statement as of March 31, 2009.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official site
• Official blog
• Facebook group