I digg, digg.com that is

Coming on the heels of one of a downer post, I wanted to get something informative and fun out there. Tony Hung, who blogs at Deep Jive Interests, is a favorite of mine (he’ll be in a blogroll post coming up in a couple months). He’ll be interested to know that I discovered his blog through his guest spot over at ProBlogger. I guess those guest posts really do pay off
Anyway, I explained in the comments of this story my experience in becoming a core digg community member. I find the story of digg.com to be extremely fascinating, so I thought I’d share it with you guys as well.

Before we can get into why digg.com is such a success, we have to go back a few years. Any real geek (provided they had cable) was addicted to ZDTV. ZDTV was a Ziff-Davis channel on cable/satellite that was dedicated to technology. You have your comedy channel, your Discovery channel, sports channel, so finally someone decided to reach out to the millions of geeks and potential geeks of the world. I happened to be one of them
ZDTV eventually became the much more descriptive TechTV. Younger, less experienced geeks would watch the show “Call for Help“, which was a sort of beginners guide to the basics of computing hosted by Leo Laporte (of TWiT fame currently). If you were a little more knowledgeable, you might flip over to a show called “The Screensavers“, which (at the time) dealt with more advanced geeky stuff (like linux, overclocking your cpu, internet protocols, etc. We’re not talking DoD stuff here, but more advanced than I was used to).

As the network gained in popularity (mostly from it’s younger audience “growing up” and spreading the word), the shows hired new personalities. Although Leo was a great geek, he just wasn’t as relatable as a younger more enthusiastic geek would have been. Enter Kevin Rose.

Kevin was hired on The Screensavers, and really did the cool stuff. He did a segment called “dark tips” which got all the budding young hackers to perk up. The new youthful cast members were a breath of fresh air for TechTV’s youthful audience.

During this time working on TSS (The Screensavers), Kevin was already thinking up the idea of starting digg. In fact, the following is a video of him showing off digg.com (obviously the 1.0 edition):

[youtube]W1_YoG7lqI4[/youtube]

Eventually, a company called G4 bought TechTV and moved to L.A. They fired Leo, Patrick quit (a TSS host) to get married, hired Alex (to replace Pat) and kept some other people. You have to understand, G4 is a video game network! They care nothing about tech. As far as they were concerned, they were buying eyeballs. Little did they know that those eyeballs were about to stop watching.

Eventually, Alex was fired, and Kevin left (here’s a video of his last day):

[youtube]laEgYg5SISg[/youtube]

In the mean time, TSS (now renamed “Attack of the Show”…yep you read that right) began to suck. Nearly all the original cast was gone (if not all) and geeks had lost the only entertainment medium geared specifically to them. I was one of those disappointed geeks.

A buddy of mine from college (shoutout Garrett) mentioned to me that Kevin and Alex were back hosting a show. It was a video podcast called “diggnation“. I asked him what it was about and he told be that basically they just sit on a couch, drink some beer, and talk about tech. Specifically, Garrett told me, they talk about the popular tech stories on this website called digg.com. Garrett told me the way the site worked, but I didn’t really have any interest.

But I did want to watch Kevin and Alex sit around and talk about tech (don’t ask me why). Kevin had produced some pretty cool online videos in the past (The Broken, systm) so I gave it a watch.

I was a few weeks behind, but I watched the videos compulsively til I got caught up. After a while, I figured I’d give this whole digg.com thing a try.

Needless to say, I was hooked. Heck, I’m still hooked. I watch the show every week, and I’ve been digging ever since. I’m what you call a “core digg community member”. Digg thrives on its community members. Members submit cool stories, members vote (simply by “digging” a story, digging essentially means “I liked that story, I’ll digg it”), and members comment on the stories (incidentally, that’s how I met George who guest blogged for me back in January).  Members can also vote on eachother’s comments too. The stories with enough “diggs” get promoted to the front page (sort of like a newspaper, but the community is the editor)

If you don’t already have a digg account, you really should get one. They’ve expanded beyond tech recently. Now you can submit and vote on stories from categories such as politics, online videos, business, tech, podcasts, and science.

Currently digg is probably pushing toward 1 million registered members. It is a huge site that’s extremely powerful, yet even the smallest and newest members have a voice. Digg pushes traffic to sites by the hundreds of thousands of uniques, and can be a very effective way for you to get your content in front of a ton of eyeballs, that is if your story gets promoted.

If you have a digg account, add me as a friend. My username is diggnate. Also, if you get the notion, click the “digg” link in the Information and Links box to your top right. There you can submit this story to digg. If the story has already been submitted, be sure to digg it!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some digging to do
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