Toluu : jay adelson

jay adelson

It’s been a wild couple of weeks. Time magazine included me in their annual TIME 100 list this year. While an extraordinary honor, it’s always a bit strange to find yourself on list like that. Last week, Digg won a Webby People’s Voice Award. And this week, Sarah Lacy is releasing her new book in which Kevin and I are among the wacky cast of characters. It’s even more startling to see yourself portrayed in a book, although so much has happened at Digg since we first started speaking with Sarah a couple of years ago. She actually finished talking to us for the book such a long time ago that it’s interesting to see her perspective from that snapshot in time.

In any case, with all of these recent events, it got me thinking about entrepreneurship and how far Digg has come in such a very short time.

It was only two years ago that Digg had a team of only fifteen people. Back then, we were still very focused on technology news, though we already had plans (from the very beginning) to launch V3 and expand beyond to other content and media types, which we did shortly after we started talking to Sarah in July of 2006.

Today, Digg’s community of users has grown to around 26

Martin Sargent is Funny.October 9 2007

We're all web drifters, really.

Long ago, prior to the days of Digg and Revision3, I was bored watching television. I wasn't busy watching Kevin Rose on TechTV, because I was at work, and heaven knows what I might think of him if I saw him in makeup. I needed to find my fix of irreverent and ridiculous television.

I discovered Unscrewed with Martin Sargent close to its first episode, in the summer of 2003, back prior to Comcast's acquisition of TechTV and subsequent conversion to G4. The show warmed my personal relationship with TechTV and the possibilities of unrestricted content. Martin, for those not familiar, is insanely genius, and frankly could care less about traditional television and the conservative restrictions most talk show hosts find themselves conforming to in even recent years.

It probably comes as no surprise that as we developed Revision3, I couldn't wait for an excuse to include Martin in our sinister plans to entertain the gazillions...Though business rationale aside, I really was just a fanboy looking for an excuse to meet him in person. I finally got my chance in October of 2005, and was happy to discover he was equally as irreverent in person as on camera, only perhaps even more hilarious.

Mart

Who's Counting?September 4 2007

Digg and Revision3 are not my first Internet businesses, but they are entirely different from my previous ventures in how success is measured by everyone around us. This is the first time I've been hostage to outside metrics companies, with which I usually have no relationship, for telling others how well I'm doing. That annoys me, of course, but "welcome to the web," analysts, reporters, and my investors tell me.

Equinix is a public company, so it was well established (and reinforced with SOX) that outside consulting companies, acting as independent auditors, would determine the accuracy of our reports. Even as a private company, I can still hire consulting firms to come in and do the same thing where revenue or valuation is concerned...Still, for the most important metric of all, usage (generally viewed through page views and unique visitors), there are no audit options. I have to rely on companies who have performed no technical audit of what is going on, providing their viewpoints through flashy websites and questionable panel methods. Doesn't anyone else see this as strange?

Well, before I get too deep into that, remember the purpose of publishing these numbers is ultimately two fold: One, to tell the public how well we're doing. Two, to tell the advertisers h

Podcasts vs. TelevisionJuly 27 2007

The astounding thing about Apple TV (formerly iTV) is why it can succeed. Streaming to the set top box is nothing new, but leveraging all your iPod owners / iTunes users to take a baby step into watching content on television is an easy user acquisition bet.

If you think of Apple TV as "yet another iPod," it makes sense. Essentially, without changing their habits or requiring any learning curve, someone who traditionally has watched time-shifted shows would easy gravitate to Apple's STB.

A classic example is how I watch Revision3's shows, and I'm not alone. I have a modded xbox that I run XBMC on, which is really the only reason I ever had an xbox anyway. It mounts my Mac via SMB. The Mac (via iTunes and other RSS technology) is up-to-date on the latest show releases.

Apple's product is essentially the same thing, with greater stability (albeit less customizable) and newer ports like HDMI. I've heard arguments that the marriage of computer to the STB, rather than having the STB download directly, is a negative... For my use, I'd rather it mount the computer, where I spend my day and arrange my downloads. I don't want to browse a STB menu and slowly try to assign RSS feeds to it... at least until someone designs a better interface for it.

Yes, I'll probably download movies as well. I'm more into Netflix HD-DVD options in my future 1080p world (not there yet), but for no

Dis-intermediate ThisJuly 27 2007

Yes, it's true, I don't post often. You can't expect to see much here, particularly with the new blog.digg.com refresh. I'm considering just redirecting there, but I figure I'll leave this up a wee bit more and if enough people ask me to keep this here I'll let it stay.

I'm being asked a lot about what I mean by dis-intermediation. Essentially, the idea is that a monopoly of some kind, whether it exists because of tradition, inertia, or simple corruption, forces a supply chain in such a way that it can't be bypassed. For example, in the past, you always had to pay a small subset of telecommunications carriers to host a website (1995-1998), or at least for the T1 or whatever the pipe was to feed it, and thus those few carriers collected a dime on every website launched. However, if you allow the content to sit next to the various networks, bypassing the local loops, you dis-intermediate the supply chain that used to exist. You are not closing the telecom companies out of the competition, you just force them to literally compete for hosting. It has economic impacts, of course, and pricing tends to fall and quality tends to climb.

With media, the same principle applies... To create a truly level playing field, allow any media object to access equal size markets as a publisher who controls a distribution platform. You don't need to have a printing press any longer, or a large p