Posted on Monday 19 December 2005 - Popularity: unranked
Definitely one of the most interesting and useful so called Web 2.0 projects this year was digg. The two creators, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson were recently interviewed by Christian Einfeldt from the Mad Penguin site:
Mad Penguin: Hi guys, thanks for this interview. Let’s start by talking a bit about the history of Digg. We all know a conversation with Slashdot founder Rob Malda had some kind of impact on your decision to start Digg, but what events happened before that conversation that are part of Digg’s history?
Kevin Rose: I was working at TechTV for three and a half years. It was one of those things where I always had little side projects that I was running out of the house. At that same time, I was interviewing the Steve Wozniaks of the world, and obviously, Rob Malda, and we’d get just tons of guests coming in every week that were really changing things in the industry. I originally got into TV to set up all the machines behind the scenes, doing all the networking, and so forth. If they needed an installation of a router set up or Linux installed somewhere, that was my job. I had always wanted to do something different, and kinda get out of that, so I had these little side projects and this project started initially with MacRumors.com. They had something called “Page 2,” and although I wasn’t a huge Mac fan, I was into it, because they had some really cool stuff.
Some Page 2 stories that didn’t quite make the home page, were still really interesting. They were stories that had been submitted, but weren’t quite popular enough to make the front page news. That got me thinking about all the submissions that were coming in to Slashdot that no one could see. That’s really where I started thinking about how it would be nice to give that control back to the community.
Great to see that the Mac community was one of the main sources for the initial idea.
