Tech & Biz

Digg's Kevin Rose: We've Got to Be More Relevant

by jordan | October 9, 2008 at 09:01 am

219 views | 5 Recommendations | 2 comments

There remains a huge gap between Web 2.0 theory and Web 2.0 practice: User-generated content sites, rather than having an even vaguely homogenous user base in terms of contribution, remain divided between an anonymous/reader-only majority and a vocal, post-happy minority. Sort of like audience members and performers.

How do you get the silent masses to join those with little user pics? That's the bajillion-dollar question.

Digg co-founder Kevin Rose addressed this during the Future of Web Apps Expo today in London.

"We have to do better," he said in his talk, called "The Future of News," and said that it's time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. "Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?"

Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, but Rose said that the site only has slightly over three million registered user accounts--those are the people actually "Digging."

One area where NowPublic seems to differ from the above is in the breadth of topics covered, even though our mandate is narrower than most UGC sites. Also, we find that many of our users are not hardcore netizens, and in some cases are generating their own content for the first time with us.

Still, the challenge is clear: bringing one's site's value to the non-digerati.

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mchawk

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 13:04 on October 11th, 2008

jordan, I like this story. It's good stuff.

It's a good question - how to increase engagement as well as readership. Is the problem figuring out who you're trying to be "relevant" to? Grabbing hardcore netziens is a lot easier than grabbing the casual browser.