What's Next For Digg ?

One of the biggest darlings of the "Web 2.0" generation is Digg, a tiny San Francisco-based company whose social news site ranks the day's top stories based on users' votes.

Kevin Rose, a former TechTV star, founded Digg in 2004 and got Internet veteran Jay Adelson--who helped build Netcom, one of the first U.S. Internet service providers, and founded networking firm Equinix (nasdaq: EQIX - news - people )--to join as the company's chief executive. Since then, the site has grown from relative obscurity to a big hit: Adelson says Digg gets about 1 million visitors a day and ten million unique visitors a month. (That number is much higher than rankings from Web measurement firms like comScore Networks; Adelson says those companies don't present an accurate picture of his audience.)

Privately funded Digg is consistently rumored as one of the next big Internet acquisition targets, especially following Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube last month. After speaking to information technology executives at the Forbes CIO Forum, Adelson sat down with Forbes.com Tuesday to chat about Digg and the new Internet boom.

Q: You've done your time in big-business IT and now you work for a cool tech media startup. What do CIOs think of you?

Adelson: I've been involved in entrepreneurship and starting businesses since 1992. I've done it the traditional way. I've been a CIO. I've spent millions of dollars on back-end systems, and I invited these large integration firms to come in and often fail at executing a back-end system. When the CIOs in the audience see me, they see Digg and a Web 2.0 company doing things completely with open source, executing faster, and there's an assumption that they have: "Well, if I do what Jay did with Digg, I would lose my job because my CEO would never take me seriously if I used these very secure, stable, well supported open source products." I just think that's a shame.

Q: When Google bought YouTube, some content creators complained because they didn't get a share of the windfall. To an extent, social Web sites are completely a product of their users. Should they get paid for their contributions?

We believe that for a community to be strong, it has to be based on other motivations. To participate in a community means you have a passion about something, and you want to participate as a result of that passion. Once you start compensating the community members, you start creating these hierarchies where one person is worth more than another person. And that's the opposite of a level playing field. It can work for smaller communities and ones that are less dependent on equality and neutrality. We don't believe it works for Digg.

Q: Is Digg for sale?

No. Digg is not for sale. Our focus is entirely on execution. The only way that Digg would ever be for sale is if someone came to me and could help me achieve my goal ten times better than what we can do alone. There's been a lot of rumors out there, and it's mostly stirred up because of the YouTube acquisition. Basically if you're a Web 2.0 company right now, somebody's going to come up with a rumor.

Q: Silicon Valley rumor mill blog ValleyWag wrote yesterday that you will be ditching Federated Media Publishing, your ad provider, for greener pastures. Is this true?

No. We're not pulling out of Federated Media. We're extremely happy with the relationship we have with them, so I have no idea where that comes from. We've seen incredible results from their team, especially in recent months. This is one of the issues with this new blogging community. There's no real way to do fact checking. There's no infrastructure to accommodate some of that. There are a lot of bloggers who do [check facts], but you have to be careful with the rumor mill, especially in the Web 2.0 space.

Q: You've grown tremendously. How often do you change the Digg gears to keep the system working right?

We watch the interactivity of the community in real time. So we are constantly reactive to what we think are trends or things that impact diversity. For example, every now and then we'll make a change to the algorithm which might take in some new factor. Maybe it has something to do with speed or history or the particular category or the time--or whatever. All these factors we've learned over two years how to tweak so that the users feel that results are better--not our subjective decision, but rather the community's. "Diggs" are an incredible factor--we can see what people are attracted to. We have a sense of what people like and what they dislike. The stories will change depending on how we tweak some of those things and how we visualize them as well.

Q: There's a lot of talk about how blogs and sites like Digg will revolutionize the news industry. But many of Digg's popular stories are from big companies like The New York Times and CNet. How do old and new play together on Digg?

Different content has different purposes. What's great about the editorial model is that it generates reporting. There's an economy around a reporter who goes out, who has editors, and gets paid to go out and do investigative reporting. There's also a publication cycle associated with those traditional outlets. Something like The New York Times will release a paper in the morning. You'll notice on Digg around the times of publication cycles, you have lots of stories from those traditional media outlets because the reporting is good and the writing is good.

But the news world, and frankly the content on the Internet world, is a live medium. It's changing every minute of every day. So other sources of news and information like blogs are fantastic for filling in those gaps. Since Digg doesn't treat one better than the other, once in a while a blogger will surface who is a great writer and actually does do a certain amount of investigative reporting, and that blog will rise to some degree of popularity.

Q: Will Digg always be a niche product for techies or can it attract a mainstream audience?

We started with technology and had that sort of underground, hip-tech culture. Kevin Rose, who founded Digg, came from TechTV, so there is that technology basis. But right now, there are more non-tech stories submitted than tech stories. The activity of politics is probably our second most popular section on all of Digg. These are not traditional IT or tech people who are contributing to this. The opportunity certainly extends beyond tech.

The first month we started Digg, we knew we were going to do other types of content, and users were submitting other types of content and [their stories were voted off the site] because it was known to be a technology site. Once we said it was OK, suddenly a flood of other users came in.

What's next for Digg? What can Diggers look forward to?

Well Digg as a company was never originally founded to focus entirely on news. News is a great content to leap off of, because it's changing constantly. We talk about it constantly, and in a way it's self-serving because the media is an incredible group to disintermediate. There are a number of types of content that disintermediation can apply to. If you can think of a content object on the Web, something that you go to the Internet to discover or learn something about, or buy or anything, I can apply Digg to those different forms of content. How I do it, the user interface behind it, it's all going to be slightly different, but I think in the next six months you'll see us branch out to a lot of other things besides news. We're busy, all 17 of us, we're cranking away as fast as we can.

Q: You have a broadcasting and film background, and you work in Internet television. What's your favorite TV show?

Right now it's probably Heroes. My wife and I watch that every Monday. We love that show. We like traditional television. I'm a sucker for crime drama. Battlestar Galactica is probably one of the best produced shows out there. I'm sci-fi fan. Then again I also love the niche programming that's available like This Old House.

That being said, I think there's room for a whole new opportunity of on-demand media, which is what Revision 3 is all about, our other company. With television, there's a point of time when I'm very passive, when it's being served to me. There's other times when I want to be proactive, when I want to go get that content from my cell phone or from my TiVo. What content is available for me out there? One of these days you're going to ask me not "What is my favorite TV show?" but "What do I watch the most?"

(this interview was conducted by Forbes.com)