Readers want to know what you Digg
SAN FRANCISCO -- People in the know are really digging Digg.
Digg leads the pack among the new and increasingly popular social-media websites. Like competitors Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit and others, Digg lets users vote on what its community should be reading.
Traffic rose about 330% to 5.6 million visitors in September, from 1.3 million the prior September, according to measurement service ComScore Media Metrix.
"People are really interested to see what other people are reading and are getting hooked on social media," says Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "On conventional news sites, the most popular and e-mailed stories are the most-trafficked areas. Digg is about doing that for everything."
How Digg works: Registered users submit Web links to Digg.com of articles, videos or podcasts they like. Submissions show up in an "Upcoming Stories" area, where other members can find it and "Digg it" by clicking on a voting tab. Popular items move out to Digg's front page.
"People realize they now have a voice in deciding what is news," says Digg founder Kevin Rose, 30.
Rose is the public face of Digg as the co-host of the popular podcast Diggnation, where he and Alex Albrecht sit in front of a laptop webcam and discuss popular Digg stories. Diggnation, which averages 300,000 viewers per show, is the No. 1 podcast in the technology area of Apple's iTunes Store.
Rose oversees the look of Digg, while handing off business duties to CEO Jay Adelson, who spends much of his time running the San Francisco-based business from his home in rural New York. Adelson raised $10 million from venture-capital firms for Digg. Adelson and Rose also operate the Web video showcase site Revision3.
"We filled a void," Adelson says of Digg's success. "The Internet today, with all the media out there and all the news sources, is far too much information for anyone to handle on their own. We're arguing that the collective wisdom of the masses is a fantastic way to filter through it all."
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