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Topics we cover in the interview

1. What’s the creative process behind digg?
2. How do you think up new features? Do you use a digg-like consensus approach to them?
3. How have you seen digg affect traditional media?
4. How will digg-spawned sites and web apps be in the future?

Full transcription of the interview

SD: Do you do programming as well as design or are you one of the individuals who’s able to see the big picture and how the pieces fit together?

KR: As far as my daily activities on the site, working for digg, it’s all about creating new features for the site, so it’s all about working with the graphic designer, Daniel Burka to come up with these features. So basically I’ll draw them up on a piece of paper and they look really ugly, and then I pass them to someone that knows how to make them look pretty, so that’s kind of how it’s been working for the last couple of years.

SD: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process?

KR: Well, it’s a very strange one in that most of it is done almost randomly, just driving around or whatever it may be, and I’ll just think of a feature and how it might impact the users and how they might use it. I’m constantly thinking about the site and so it doesn’t feel like work, more like a way to figure out how users want to communicate and share information with each other. We’ve come up with dozens of different features, a lot of them that we’ve thrown away because we don’t think they’re a good fit, or features that we just haven’t time to build, create and roll them out yet, so it’s really looking at how the users are expressing themselves on the site and seeing what they are doing with the site, what are the pitfalls? Where do they get lost in the navigation? Can they not discover stories because of one reason another? Is there a story that falls through the cracks because it wasn’t highlighted in a certain way, and how can we draw out the best information presented to the users and then give them the tools that they need to be able to share it with all of their friends using digg?

And so we keep that in mind and think about – I know this sounds really strange and basic – but what would be cool and useful, what people would really like to do, and what would keep them coming back and really finding the information they want to find.

SD: Do you use something that’s parallel to digg, where it’s kind of a consensus vote into what you feel will actually work? Do you take that into your in-house creative process?

KR: Well, it’s really myself and Daniel, and so we sit down and we come up with different things and eventually we’ll turn them into mockups. So after there’s a design that’s been on a piece of scratchpaper it’s handed off to him and he’ll come up with a series of different mockups and different layouts for that particular feature or design. We’ll take a look at it, then present it to the rest of the staff and let them play around with it, see what they think about the feature, take their feedback and then ultimately we’ll just make the decision on whether we should push it out or not.

SD: Do you have demographics on your core users? Who are the people that are sitting and spending large chunks of time to vote the stories up?

KR: It typically tends to be your standard eighteen to thirty-four year old male user for the most part, but there’s different types of users on the site, and we’ve really seen that split and fragment when we rolled out the new sections in digg version three. For the longest time we were a technology news site, so it was all about the tech fans and tech enthusiasts, but right after we launched version three we saw a huge explosion in user registration and it was from a lot of users that don’t fit our typical demographic because they’re interested in other types of news online. So the number two most popular section on our site today is our political section – those are very hot topics, and then actually followed by videos, so videos is our first stab at content outside of just news and has been extremely popular for us, and it’s been a great way to expose users to a lot of cool videos around the web.

SD: Are you finding that larger news agencies or advertising agencies are starting to use digg as a poll factor?

KR: You know, it’s really shortening the length of the feedback loop. It’s one of those things where they are using it to find out what is hot at any given moment in time, especially as you can sort most diggs in any given section and you can see what people are talking about, where they’re gathering around, what stories are very interesting for a given day, etc.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from writers that said, hey, y’know what, I pulled up on the day that Apple announced all of their new products, and looked up a digg swarm (which is basically a Flash visualisation of all the users as they’re swarming around the different stories), and they were able to watch that over the course of a few hours and see where the most attention was [and work out] which product did they want to focus their article on. They found out that it was the iTV, the little set-top box, that was an extremely popular story that day and so they created content around that because they knew that that was going to be a hot topic. So it’s helping journalists and writers in that way, in that they can find out in real-time what the pulse is of the community is online.

SD: And how about advertising agencies – are they referencing back to digg to see how to shape their next story or campaign?

KR: You know, we haven’t had a ton of ad agencies contact us, other than the fact that they’ve said they would like to have their ads diggable, and I don’t know if our users want to digg advertisements! So that’s one of those things where I was like, “Can we get back to you on that one?! But not really at this time, not that I know of!

SD: What do you think are the long-term implications for social content? If we look two or three years down the line, what is the digg universe going to look like, what are the digg-spawned applications and websites going to look like?

KR: Well, I think that digg is a great tool for sharing your interests with others, and I think that there has never really been a tool online where there’s – I’m trying to think of what I can say and what I can’t say! We really want to build out a profile of users’ interests and be able to group these together and get recommendations on different things based on people that you trust. So whether that be your news, or other different types of content online, it’s really about not only getting recommendations but suggestions and also introducing you to new things that you might not know of through people that you’re connected with, and people that you’ve never met.

So one of the things that we’re doing at digg right now that’s very exciting to us (that we haven’t launched yet) is we’re learning a lot about what individual people are digging on the site and so what we really want to do is allow the users – I mean, we should do everything in our power to give back to the users based upon what they’re giving us. So they’re giving us history and they’re sharing their history with everyone based on what they’re digging. What we can do is, on the back end, do the math to make comparisons to other users and say, ok, based on what you’re into, I know you love sports cars and I know you love oolong tea, I can make a connection there with other types of stories, and I can also make a connection with people that you haven’t met before, so it’s going to be really interesting when social networking sites are no longer based on just, “I think this person is attractive and I want to meet them,” but more along the lines of, “I know I have a connection with this person in one way or another because we digg the same comments, we like the same stories, and we might even live close to each other and might want to meet up,” so there’s going to be a whole nice range of tools that we’ll be providing to the community over the next year that are going to allow them to explore these relationships in ways that they never thought possible.

SD: Very cool. What is the relationship between, say, digg and Flickr? Is something like that a possibility?

KR: Well, y’know, it’s one of those things where we really want to give users the power to digg and share whatever is important to them and we’re not limiting that to any one particular type of content online so whether it’s pictures or you name it, anything where there is an abundance of information that needs a large collaborative filter applied to it to sift through that, we’ll be going. As long as it’s relevant too, I mean there’s certain things that you really wouldn’t want to dig – you couldn’t really apply digg to an online dating service because you wouldn’t want to digg someone that you’re interested in because then everyone else would want to go out with them! So we know there’s limitations to the concept, but there are a lot of really cool areas that we can apply the concept to, so you’ll see that rolled out, definitely some new areas in the next few months.

SD: Any last comments?

KR: Thanks for having me, and just thought I’d let you know that I’m huge fan of the site and I digg your stories all of the time. It’s awesome!

SD: Thanks Kevin.

Transcribed by Scott Morris

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