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Kevin Rose on Digg

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Kevin Rose, founder of Digg is on stage and is apparently going to make an announcement. First he talks about the Digg ecosystem. The first thing is to create incentives at every level. Why should people submit content? People want to share stories they think are important and they want recognition for doing it (like Slashdot). People want to store things that are important (del.icio.us). His aim was to solve both motivations. Empowering the user and giving them a vote is fundamental – when people Digg something they are increasing its value throughout the site. There was a virtuous circle – content which gets Diggs drives traffic which encourages site owners to add buttons to get Diggs.

There are some issues we have been having. We have 900,000 users and they don’t always get along. How can you create tools to allow the community to moderate itself? We need tools which reward good behaviour at the topic level. We need a system to dispute and review inaccurate information. We want to allow the community to attach other things to a story, links, pictures, videos and so on. We want to add location-based services to add a geographic dimension.

We have spent a lot of time looking at what people are Digging? You don’t realise how many people you are agreeing with on a regular basis. There is a difference between true friends and people who you tailgate – people whose opinions you value. There can also be value in what people bury and other people bury. We want to show people upcoming stories which aren’t yet popular but which you might be interested in based on what you have done in the past.

We have dedicated resources to working on spotting spammer and gamers and we constantly work to detect and eliminate them.

We will be launching a Flash toolkit which plugs into our API which will allow visualisations of user behaviour – where are people changing their interests.

We will provide a tool which allows you to export your attention data, to export friends data. We will be supporting OpenID in the next few weeks (there we are – the announcement. This was very well received by the audience)

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by Jim Muttram