The Founder and Visionary of Digg.com, Kevin Rose: Internet Wizard or High-Tech Fraud?

Digg.com just passed an internet milestone: 1 million registered users are now online with the very popular social bookmarking site. But back in March of 2006, when Digg.com was at 225,000 users, Digg.com founder Kevin Rose was begging for a handout from any investor who would listen to his pleas. He was desperately looking for at least $3 million, thinking that was enough money to help him reach half a million registered users for his company. When asked why he needed such a huge influx of cash for Digg.com, Rose said he would love to get a cash infusion from anybody who seemed like the "right" fit. Luckily enough for Rose, Marc Andreessen, Greylock Partners and Omidyar Network, among other investors, decided to take the plunge and they invested in Digg.com just weeks after Rose made that statement.

A rumor that was generated after Rose's statement, was that Yahoo! wanted to buy Digg.com for $35 million. Of course that never happened, but statements like the one Rose made, saying that he would allow the "right" company to buy Digg always makes news, seeing as how these huge media mergers happen on a weekly basis nowadays, and magazines love to speculate about who's buying who.

It's amazing that Digg was able to get to the one million mark without a huge company like Microsoft or Yahoo behind them, but you have to give Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson a lot of props for their tenacity to reach that goal on their own. I'm sure that Digg has gotten more cash advances in the form of tech investors after that $2.8 million infusion of 2006, but this article is not about finances. It's about the now uncertain future that Digg.com faces from being the "big man on the totem pole", and from the latest controversy concerning the banning of quite a few people from being able to subscribe and post on Digg.com.

To really understand the implications of "fraud" and "sell-out" thrown in the direction of Rose and company, you'll need a little back story on how Digg.com came into this world.

In March of 2003, Kevin Rose was hired as a production assistant for The Screen Savers television show on TechTV. The only qualifications that Rose had for the job was the fact that in the past he had been employed at several failed dot com start-ups after dropping out of UNLV. But he was willing to accept the small salary that the position paid and the owners of TechTV thought he had a vibrant personality. His personality was so strong in fact, that the producers of TechTV decided to let him appear on the show as "The Dark Tipper" after having been at his production assistant job for just a few months.

After fellow host Leo Laporte left TechTV, Rose stepped in to take his place. It was during this period of time that Rose formed Digg.com with his friend Jay Adelson. Their vision was inspired by the pioneering tech-driven website "Slashdot.com" according to Rose himself, he could not understand why they weren't allowing their users to view all their submitted stories,so his idea was to start a news website where you could give complete control to the web community.

A noble effort to be sure, but an ideology loaded with land mines just waiting to explode in his face. To most of Digg.com's detractors, the main problem with the site is the fact that the best content that actually has real value to it is invariably lost to the hundreds of thousands of tech geeks who are only concerned with reading about how the latest version of the Ipod fares with the earlier versions, or reading about which site to go to that has the best nude picture of Lindsey Lohan. If these people actually do read an article of any value, they "Undigg" it and tell all their geeky friends to do the same, thereby making sure that the well-written and informative article never sees the light of day on the front page of the site.

The outrage that a lot of writers feel about Digg not being able to deliver their finest work to the mass audience through this "community" site, is nothing compared to the craziness surrounding the latest controversy regarding this social bookmarking site. The site's new problems are also due to its increasing popularity with the geek crowd, so you need to know a little bit of the history behind how Rose and Adelson attracted such a huge amount of the socially awkward techies to their site.

Before March of 2005, Digg only had 12,000 registered viewers. That all changed mid-month of that year however, when a man who had either recovered or stolen the Blackberry of Paris Hilton posted a message on DIgg that gave out all of Hilton's phone numbers and other information that was listed in her Blackberry's memory, in effect revealing thirty or more personal home phone numbers of every rich and famous person that Paris was friends with to the entire internet world. After that incident, the number of registered viewers skyrocketed up to 180,000 within a few months. This all leads up to when Rose got the cash infusion to bring Digg's social network technology up to the highest standard possible, and gave Rose the ability to spend more money on advertising for the site, which would ultimately culminate in reaching that one million users milestone in 2007.

Because of this new-found popularity, Digg.com became the biggest player on the internet scene when it came to social networking. Its just a fact of life that when a small website turns into a giant behemoth, people love to try to take it down by any means necessary. But with the latest controversy, those detractors may be justified in their actions in trying to bring this Goliath back down to earth. A new term, "Online Riot", was even coined for the backlash relating to the unjustified actions from Kevin Rose, who decided to pull and then banish a poster at Digg.com who had posted the key code for unlocking the copy protection on HD-DVD's, which would allow people to copy DVD's in high def, a huge breakthrough for all hackers worldwide.

The fact that Rose pulled this post after it had generated a Digg rating of 15,000, made a lot of people consider Rose a huge "sell-out" because HD-DVD just happens to be a big advertiser and sponsor of Digg, a HUGE conflict of interest for certain . This move by Rose enraged so many people, that they actually started posting in vast numbers the actual HD-DVD key code on Digg's front page. They would put the code in their comments section, URl address or even in their posting's error messages with the code embedded discretely in a phone number sequence. This continued for days on end until some tech wizard at Digg.com put an ending to it somehow by removing all of the hundreds of key code listings embedded in various postings throughout the Digg universe.

The controversy continues to this day over whether Kevin Rose is a "sell-out" and a fraud by banning the original poster with the HD-DVD code and every other negative poster who writes critical articles about Digg? Or is he just website owner who wants his site to be taken seriously as a real news site, not just another tech site that appeals to the puerile interests and juvenile behavior of the geek squad? After reading this article you should have enough information on the subject to decide for yourself.

On one side you have the tech geeks who cry foul every time they don't get what they want, and on the other side you have the intelligent readers and writers of the internet world who only want to be able to find and distribute quality articles to their like-minded brethren on the web.

It's up to you, Kevin Rose. Which side will you fight for?