Common Paradox Tech Blog

As of today, Digg is five years old. Think about that: that’s around 1825 days of story submissions, front page wrangling, and explosive growth. Hell, Digg is older than Twitter and YouTube.

Now that we’ve had half a decade to digg and be dugg, it seems like a perfect time to reflect on Digg’s history, growth, and struggles. While there are many events that shaped the character of the social bookmarking site, five events across five different years stood out to us as pivotal moments in Digg’s history.

Below is a recounting of some of the company’s major turning points, from its birth in 2004 to its struggle to become profitable this year. Here are five of the biggest milestones in Digg’s history:

1. Digg’s Launch

You can’t start a list like this without recognizing how it all began. In November of 2004, founder Kevin Rose (former host on TechTV), along with Owen Byrne (original developer), Ron Gorodetsky, and Jay Adelson (now Digg’s CEO) helped get Digg off the ground. On December 4th, 2004, it launched to the public with less than 1000 users.

Back then, it was simple, ad-free, and focused on tech, but it was the birth of a social media juggernaut.

2. Diggnation

On July 1, 2005, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht (Kevin’s previous co-host on TechTV’s The Screen Savers), started a video podcast centered around what was popular on Digg. It was one of the first three shows to launch on a new Internet video network called Revision3.

That show was Diggnation, and it quickly grew with the help of loyal diggers into one of the largest and most popular video podcasts around. It helped push Digg and its brand to new audiences while acting as the flagship program for Revision3 at the same time.

Diggnation’s impact on the Digg brand and its community has been tremendous, although it hasn’t helped push Digg into the mainstream consciousness. Still, 231 episodes later, Diggnation has been a big success.

3. Launch of Digg 3.0

The social bookmarking website has gone through several iterations, but perhaps the most important one of them all was when Digg 3.0 launched on June 26th, 2006.

What was so special about Digg Version 3? It was when Digg launched topics and categories, expanding it beyond its technology base. Politics, gaming, business, science, and all of its various verticals have successfully grown and helped Digg exceed its technology roots, although it is still the core that holds the Digg community together.

4. Digg DRM Revolt

While it’s always been known that Digg and its users have a lot of influence across the web, it was made clear to everybody in dramatic fashion on May 1st, 2007.

A group of hackers successfully found a way to crack the Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection of the now-defunct HD-DVD standard. With the encryption cracked, Digg’s users posted the code and instructions on how to copy and crack HD-DVDs

Digg itself was worried that the cracked keys would result in lawsuits and cease and desist orders. Thus, they decided to delete articles referencing it and, in a blog post, stated that “In order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law.”

That’s when Digg went out of control. Its users flooded the entire website with nothing but the HD-DVD crack or anti-Digg submissions. Digg couldn’t keep up. Eventually Kevin Rose stepped in and conceded to the community’s wishes. From his blog post.

“But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”

It was on this day that Digg proved its power and really caught the attention of the mainstream media.

5. Digg Ads

At the beginning of this year, Digg was in crisis mode. It laid off 10% of its staff and focused on getting profitable after it was revealed that the company made only made $6.4 million in the first nine months of 2009.

Digg had a plan, however. In June, the company revealed Digg Ads, a new system of advertising where users would control how much advertisers pay for ad space on the homepage of Digg and elsewhere. They officially launched on August 6th.

It’s too early to tell how successful Digg Ads will eventually be, but so far, the future of Digg Ads (and Digg itself) look bright.

Reviews: Digg

Tags: digg, diggnation

Let the trumpets sound and the games begin. It’s not the Oscars or the Olympics, but it is the commencement of the 3rd annual Crunchies Awards that we’re pleased to co-host with GigaOm and VentureBeat (click for their coverage today).

Yes, this is the time of year that we stop bickering among ourselves as bloggers, and come together to honor the startups, products and entrepreneurs who make our lives so much fun.

The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best technology accomplishments of 2009. There are 18 award categories to recognize accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. And to keep things fresh, we have a few new award categories this year too. Our focus is start-ups, but big companies and products can be winners too.

Starting today, nominate your favorite companies, products and people for consideration in 18 different award categories. Self nominations are welcome. Grab a badge here and get your community to support you for finalist consideration. Nominations are open through midnight pst December 4, 2009 .

In February of this year, Adam Carolla, the former co-host of Loveline and The Man Show, was out of a job after his morning radio show, The Adam Carolla Show, was cancelled. Instead of wandering around waiting for his next gig though, Adam launched The Adam Carolla Podcast just three days after his cancellation.

The result? Over a million downloads in the first week, and it only grew from there. His show is now the most popular podcast on iTunes with millions of downloads every month.

His jump from the radio world to the social media world has been an interesting one, so were decided to sit down with Adam at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas to see just how he built the show, what he thinks of social media, and…what his dating turn-ons are.

We hope you enjoy the interview. You may want to skip to about 3 minutes in if you want to skip Adam’s impromptu dating video (though it is hilarious). We covered a lot of different bases with the comedian:

Tags: Adam Carolla, interview, podcasting

Finovate2009, an event centered around the future of finance, is on today in New York City so expect a couple of interesting announcements from the online money management industry this morning and later this week. We had previously covered Billshrink’s new offering and Outright.com opening up its beta to the public.

Later today, content recommendation and discovery software builder Strands will announce that its personal finance subsidiary moneyStrands has teamed up with Savings.com to bring personalized online coupon recommendations to the company’s personal budgeting & online money management platform.

So here we go then, the fourth and final part of my award-winning TechCrunch50 coverage; the all-important ’round-up’. This is where I ask appropriately round-uppy questions like “what did we learn this week?” “what were the highlights of the event?” and “is there any chance it will happen again next year, given that the whole spectacle climaxed with Arrington walking off stage as co-host Calacanis led the audience in some weird, embarrassing clapping game?”

I’ll get to that last question in due course but first, given that the “what did we learn?” question has already been answered by Lacy and Arrington, let’s consider the highlights.