Digg’s Jay Adelson Speaks!
At some point and sooner than later, if I had to make a bet, Digg will be sold. And, likely as not, the most likely owner for the popular new site is Google.
And it is no real secret in Silicon Valley that the pair have been talking on and off for a while now, as Google (GOOG) mulls where to take Google News and Digg ponders how it can grow and improve its reliability by being linked to the largest and most neutral company it can.
But after all the Sturm und Drang around news of a phony bidding war for Digg between Google and Microsoft (MSFT) with prices hovering around $200 million that broke out a month ago (which BoomTown refuted in a post here), I thought it was long about time I chatted with its CEO Jay Adelson, to talk about the future of Digg and also the state of news online.
While photogenic Digg founder Kevin Rose often gets the focus as the geek-in-charge at the company, Adelson has had as much skin in the game and also has a deep tech background at early Internet networking companies like Netcom and also as a founder of Equinix.
Traveling between his home in New York and Digg’s San Francisco HQ, Adelson has been helming the user-generated news-discovery site, as it has grown to its current 27 million unique monthly visitors and 250 million page views. Adelson says Digg is poised to be profitable this year.
And while it is easy to find problems–pointing to aggressive competitors like Mixx and Yahoo’s (YHOO) BuzzTracker and serious and nagging issues around technological glitches (like yesterday, for example)–Digg still remains one of the most interesting and substantial start-ups to emerge from the Web 2.0 landscape.
Adelson talks about all this, with an interesting perspective on the hothouse that is Silicon Valley and also where things are going in the digital sector.
Here’s the video:
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
Comments
I just wanted to point out how you guys have a link to put this on the Digg clone Yahoo! Buzz, but a Digg link in the same sense is nowhere to be found. C’mon, really?
Posted by Greg German at April 9th, 2008 at 12:45 pmGreg:
It is in Share button. Click it.
Posted by Kara Swisher at April 10th, 2008 at 3:46 amVery interesting interview — though it raises more questions than it answers.
The definition of term “blogger” may indeed be changing quite significantly.
In web 1.0, it was unknown — the term was basically “created” / “explained” to the wider population during this era. The original meaning of the term was something like: someone who keeps a diary of musings online (derived for the verb “to log”).
In web 2.0, it became what it is now known as throughout the tech community (though perhaps the wider population is still stuck on the web 1.0 definition): today a blogger is basically a meta-reporter. The fact that bloggers rarely create original content is a recurring theme that was also recently commented on in a “This Week in Tech (TWIT)” mp3-cast. But blogging is still seen as a “destination” thing insofar as bloggers seem to expect users to visit “their” (proprietary) weblogs — so it is somewhat ironic that Jay seems to be criticizing “old media” for acting as if “you need to come to us”.
I feel that in the future (3.0? 4.0? 4.6? see e.g. http://www.squidoo.com/finding ) web-logging will be entirely distributed (whenever I think of this I am reminded of the liner notes to Brian Eno’s Nerve Net — but I am dating myself here ;)… — so people will more and more go to “SEMANTIC” locations (e.g. “news” or “movies” or “baby” or “digg” or “live” or whatever [indeed, in a facebook post I made a couple months ago, people actually DID comment that they use “digg” as a verb — hmm, didn’t the Beatles do a song called “Digg It”? ;]) — and INDIVIDUAL (whether personal or corporate) comments/remarks will become less and less significant (compared to the social/community commentary).
Note, however, that a still significantly undervalued data point is the “content” known as the “domain name”. This is AUTHORIZED content — unlike most (if not all) other web content, this data field must be registered and linked to an administrator, who can be held responsible for the information published at that location (see also my comment on a businessweek.com article that raised the “value of content” issue: http://app.businessweek.com/Us.....840#248840 ).
Sorry for rambling…
nmw
Posted by Norbert Mayer-Wittmann at April 12th, 2008 at 6:00 amWell, in the beginning, what I term web 1.0, it was about information, and “links” cross-references between physically separate pieces of information. Surfing the web. Hypertext. Then people discovered that they could be their own publishers. They could publish themselves for little or no-cost. Then people discovered other people who also had the same idea, to publish themselves. Then people started connecting with people of like-minds, which led to the birth of social networks. The next step is what are the meanings of these social networks? What are the meanings of these connections(and sometimes disconnections) that we and others make? Relationships are built on trust. People value friends they can trust. People disvalue friends they can’t trust. You can extrapolate that to media sources, as well, like The Times, or the Journal. On a tangent, one might check out Marshall McLuhan, if you want to really have a firmer grasp of media. That’s all I have, for now.
Posted by rod sandcones at April 18th, 2008 at 11:23 am