Digg
From Wikinfo
| Digg | |
|---|---|
| URL | www.digg.com |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | News aggregator/Social content website |
| Registration | Free |
| Owner | Digg, Inc. |
| Created by | Kevin Rose |
| Launched | December 5, 2004 |
- For criticism see Criticism of Digg
Digg is a 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.[1]
Contents |
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.[2] "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.[3] 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.[4]
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.
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | San Francisco, California (December 5, 2004)[5] |
| 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 | 21 |
| Website | digg.com |
See also
References
- ^ Revisiting Top 10 Web Predictions of 2006
- ^ MacManus, Richard (2006-02-01). "Interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose, Part 1". ZDNet. http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/index.php?p=108. Retrieved on 2006-07-15.
- ^ Silverorange | Digg
- ^ "Diggproof your Wordpress". Circle 6 Design. 2007-01-22. http://blog.circlesixdesign.com/2007/01/22/diggproof/. Retrieved on 2008-03-15.
- ^ Corporate Profile - Digg, Inc., 2006-09-28, http://techaddress.wordpress.com/2006/09/28/corporate-profile-digg-inc/, retrieved on 2009-01-18
| This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Digg. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of this Wikinfo article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. |
