Kevin Rose Archive

It’s been a really, really long time since we took a look at Digg. For those of you that are new to CN, Digg was the first site I reviewed when I started CenterNetworks. I remember attending the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco in late 2006 and hearing Digg founder Kevin Rose speak at the conference. So many attendees I spoke with were there to hear specifically to hear Rose speak — you can read my notes from his presentation.

This week the big news in the valley wasn’t the new iPhone OS, but rather the removal of Digg CEO Jay Adelson and the announcement that Kevin Rose has taken over as CEO of Digg. I think this is actually a smart move for Digg — below I share the reasons why.

Digg has been losing mindshare over the last year as sites like Twitter and Facebook take over as the sharing leaders. Bloggers I spoke with prefer pushing FB/Twitter because they will see at least some traffic whereas Digg is an all or nothing game. And if you aren’t a top digger or a digg-friendly site, your chances of hitting the home page are nearly zero. Lastly, many of the larger blogs were given the free Twitter follower gift which provides for massive traffic and sharing. There’s another big benefit of pushing Twitter over Digg – readers immediately visit your site/blog and potentially interact at the source rather than the chance of losing the reader at the middleman site.

Continue reading “The Two Things Digg Has Left” »

A year ago I reviewed the first episode of NBC tech drama Chuck. Overall the writers have done an excellent job in bringing in geek technology without making it appear fake. From dropping a wikipedia here and a router there, it’s a fun little show.

However in this week’s episode, a comment was made by Chuck’s sidekick Morgan that clearly had me wondering. I’ve embedded the clip below (30 seconds). Morgan (and clearly NBC as the creator of the show) didn’t get the memo from Diggnation founder Kevin Rose. You see Diggnation is sponsored by the Zune, the Microsoft music player. If Kevin and Revision3 are taking the $$ from Microsoft for the Zune, you know that it is a damn fine quality product and should not be joked with. Let’s hope that next week Chuck will check the current lineup of sponsors for Diggnation and properly handle them if the need arises inside of the episode.