Mad Pengiun features an interview with uber-cool social bookmarking / tech news site DIGG founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson.  DIGG is basically a Slashdot-type news site, but here the users/readers dictate which content will be featured by voting or “DIGGing” for the news they like.

In essence, Digg has turned its readers into news editors. Doc Searls has famously said that “open source is what happens when the demand side supplies itself.” Digg has been applying that concept to the news since its birth day on December 5, 2004. As the two lead Diggers, Digg CEO Jay Adelson and Digg founder Kevin Rose, explain in this interview, by February, 2005, the mainstream media were already calling Kevin and Jay on the phone, wondering why they were getting spikes in traffic from Digg.com.


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Digg is “Disrupting the Fourth Estate” by doing the news cheaper, faster, and more narrowly tailored to the tastes of its individual readers. Kevin Rose started Digg with only about $1,000.00 USD in cash expenditures. Big media no longer is the sole owner of the printing presses. If Kevin can start Digg with only $1,000.00 and enable his millions of daily readers to become news editors, what does that mean for the future of big media?

Note that DIGG recently got US$ 2.8 million in venture capital funding (DIGG comment thread here)!

That’s an interesting business model.  Shell out a thousand bucks.  Build a great community site.  Get approached by angel investors a few months after.  And then get to celebrate your first birthday 2.8 million bucks richer.

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