Journal #2 Digg Reader, a far cry from Digg's birth as a social news source.

Journal #2 Digg Reader, a far cry from Digg's birth as a social news source.

I have much higher opinions of Digg Reader than I initially had after using it as my first stop for news in the morning this week. I actually really enjoy how Digg Reader searches for and organizes the content and sources so easily. This brings me immediately to question number one though.

   (Q1) What is the point of Digg Reader if RSS Readers are built into every internet browser?

   A: It's all about the searching. Digg Reader's search feature is outstanding. I was able to find so many   different places to get information for things that I am interested in, for example, I didn't even know the GeoPolitical research company, STRATFOR, releases any of it's articles for free via it's RSS feed. Simply by searching GeoPolitics, I was able to see that someone was linking to STRATFOR's GeoPolitics feed and I was able to search just for STRATFOR and found the feed immediately. The organization is so plain and simple, it makes it a marvelous way to skim through the headlines or jump fully into an article.

I used Digg back when it first started in 2004 and was an active user for three years, before it's demise. What interests me is how Digg become an RSS reader, as the original Digg.com was founded by Kevin Rose, a former TechTV personality and was actually a social news website. A social news website is a space where user's sign up and submit content (article, blog, news, picture, video, whatever) and other users can comment or "like" or "dislike" the content. Social news websites gained major popularity on the web around the same side Facebook took over MySpace as the leading social media web site. Digg's way of sorting content was by to put the content with the most "diggs" (likes) at the top and "buried" (dislikes) content would be at the bottom. Check out how Digg used to look by using the "Wayback Machine" from our first class http://archive.org/web/. Digg's early years were a huge success, with millions of active users all over the world. This caught the eye of the CEO of a startup internet entertainment and content creation company called Revision3 http://revision3.com and eventually had a staggering $200 million in funding and revenue. Podcasts and video casts seemed to be the future and Revision3 wanted the jump on it, using Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht both of whom would easily recognized by the tech savvy or those who watched TechTV (before it was sold to G4 TV). Together they launched a video podcast called "Digg Nation" which would feature Kevin and Alex commenting on the most dugg stories of the week and interacting with Digg users. The show and the website were widely popular from 2004 up until 2008, when researchers showed that a huge amount of the most popular stories that made it to the front page were submitted by around 100 users. This revelation caused an uproar in the community and that is when upper management decided to push a more advertising based formula for calculating the amount of diggs a piece of submitted content would get and add limits to the amount of content people could submit. The Digg community was outraged at the change and thus began the demise of Digg. As Digg began to flop, Kevin and the other influential founders left the site and Digg became a husk of it's former self, as most of its users abandon it to other social news outlets like Reddit and StumbleUpon. Kevin Rose now works as a venture partner with Google Ventures, which invests in startup companies on behalf of Google. This brings me to my second question.

   (Q2) Why did what was left of Digg become an RSS reader?

   A: Simply put, Google was completely dropping it's RSS reader called Google Reader. Internet forum discussions during the time show that the Google Reader community was extremely disheartened with the announcement and were actively seeking solutions but not one of the other RSS collection websites did not offer the same easy to use and manage interface as Google. Digg saw this as an opportunity to evolve the company to fill the gap Google was leaving behind and captured a good amount of Google Reader's former users.