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Kevin Rose is well known in the tech community for his work on TechTV’s The Screen Savers, and Attack of the Show!  Since then, he quit his day-job to pursue projects like digg and Revision3 (his IPTV production company).  For more information about Kevin, check out his blog and Wikipedia entry.

Alright Kevin, lets get right into it… What is digg?

Digg is a news and content website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.  It prioritizes content based on actual user interest rather than editorial assumptions made by a few people.

How and when did digg start?

Digg started in September 2004 as a personal project.  It was a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote content without the external editorial control.  After a very short time, we realized that we were on to something, as digg was becoming a great resource for breaking news stories, sometimes even before traditional media.  Today digg has more than 140,000 registered users - a figure that is doubling every three months—and more than 500,000 unique visitors every day.

How much money did you start the company with and what did you put it towards?

To get the initial site off the ground, probably about $1,500.  I spent the money paying my friend Owen Byrne, who is now the senior developer on digg, for his help.  Our servers were $99 first month, and a $99 set up fee.

How many employees did you start with?  How many currently?  How did Jay Adelson get involved in the mix?

Just myself at first.  After thinking through the concept, I wrote a scope document for my friend, and developer, Owen Byrne to create a beta of the idea to run out of my house.  My friend, Jay Adelson, the founder of Equinix, then joined as an advisor and eventually CEO.  Once we received our VC funding in October, we were able to hire several others.  In fact, we’re still hiring, so if you know any good developers, send them our way.

We’re currently at 10 employees.

Is there one thing that you would go back and change about digg or the company if you could?

When we initially built digg, we didn’t put a whole lot of thought into scaling the site.  It was just a social experiment at first.  Several months later (due to success) we had to spend several weeks rewriting several key parts of the site.  Lesson learned: Plan for wild success.

With such a simple, yet genius concept for a site, we have to ask… How does the backend work?

We are a proud LAMP site.  Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

I have to complement you on the new Digg Spy.  What other features are you working on?

Soon, we’ll be expanding outside of the tech news category into areas like science news, political news, etc.  In this sense, we’ll be developing new areas for digg that will be similar to sections of a newspaper.  We’ll also be adding more tools and functionality to the site.  Our goal is to give users even more control and to provide real-time visibility into what’s happening on digg.

As you may know, we took questions from our readers for our interview with you.  “KSDigerati” has a great question for you…

“Congratulations with the success of Digg, Digg is so successful however that once a site makes the homepage it becomes “Diggoomed” or so heavy with traffic that access may be unavailable. Has there been any thought to caching sites when they are promoted to the homepage?”

We have to be very careful when caching content.  Reducing the number of hits to the source site may impact that publications advertising revenue and overall site traffic.  While caching would help some sites that crash under heavy load, the last thing we want to do is take traffic and users away from the sources that deserve it.

It’s amazing that a site can be run without editors or anything.  Do you feel like you’re placing too much trust in the digg community?

Not at all.  We definitely believe in the wisdom of crowds and that this phenomenon that is driving digg, Wikipedia and other user-driven sites is poised for strong growth in many different areas.  Our basic philosophy is giving users the power to change the site and the tools to change how they interact with each other.

And yet another question from a reader… “grizwald” asked the following…

“Is the moderation of digg strictly automated, or do you sometimes find it necessary to manually remove some entries?  If you have manually removed things, why do you do it, and how often?”

The moderation is entirely user-driven.  In very limited cases, if users violate the terms of service, digg will intervene.  But, the great thing about the digg community is that it is self-policing and thus, we rarely need to intervene because users have already done it for us.

I can’t even believe that digg’s only been around for a year.  It seems like it took off within weeks… Did you ever see it getting this big?

We really started this as an experiment and were hoping that the idea of web democracy would work.  We were really surprised how fast the website became popular.  When digg was indexed on Yahoo! and Google News after the infamous Paris Hilton cellphone hack, it created so much traffic that we knew we were on to something big.

When did you realize that digg was going to get so huge?

Definitely with the Paris Hilton cellphone incident.  That was a major turning point for us.  A user close to the hacker submitted the story to digg, and due to its *cough* traction with the digg audience it was quickly dugg to the homepage.  That same night Google and Yahoo! both indexed digg and gave us the top position for the keywords ‘paris hilton hack’.  At the time we were only running one webserver.  As you can imagine, for the next two days the site was hammered with traffic and digg hardly functioned.

You and Alex work very well together on the podcast.  Has that significantly increased the amount of hits that digg gets?

That’s hard to say.  I know that the popularity of digg has definitely driven a large number of people to Diggnation.  Diggnation continues to be a fun outlet for us to discuss our favorite digg stories, as well as an excuse to drink more beer.

Now to the business question… Tell us about this $2.8 million investment.  How did that happen?  How did you get in touch with the investors?  (Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners.)

In mid-2005 we realized that to take the site to the next level and accommodate the growing community on digg, we needed some funding to buy more servers and hire developers.  So, for this, we went to the VC community for a small round of funding.  We spoke with several and were in the fortunate position of being able to be selective.  In the end, we went with Greylock, Omidyar, Marc, and Reid Hoffman because we felt their understanding of our business and the perspectives of their organizations made them ideal partners.

And here are some final readers’ questions…

“What programming languages do you know?” -mddigger

In school I studied Pascal and C.  Later I picked up PHP and Perl.  However, this was years ago.  Owen is truly the man behind all digg code.

“How did you get your start in the tech business?”

I studied computer science in college and worked for several dot coms during the boom years.  Then I started working at TechTV, primarily to help them with the systems behind the scenes.  They brought me on the show a few times and eventually I became a regular and then host of The Screen Savers.

“What are some sites you visit daily?”

hmm, techcrunch.com, we-make-money-not-art.com, macrumors.com, makezine.com, boingboing.net, askaninja.com

“When you first left college, did you ever think that your career would reach this point?” -Christopher

No - I just pursued my geek interests and it led me here. I’m just happy and fortunate to be doing what I love.

And finally… “what would you say is the most time consuming… digg or Revision3?”

Digg is the primary focus at this point.  The site is growing so fast and we have so many plans to expand the community that it has been non-stop for the past year.  Revision3 has several full-time employees that are working on creating new shows and expanding the network offering in 2006.  I do however spend time working on Rev3 but right now it’s mostly on the weekends.

Thanks for your time Kevin.

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