Inside Digg

As many of you know, my site got dugg about a week ago and all I’m able to say is holy digg effect batman. I’ve had over 8,289 hits since then and I’ve moved to a new server. I hope all works out. I have a little insider info for you guys today that I thought would fit the recent events pretty well. I emailed digg.com for some general information and here is what they have to save:

1. How was the idea for digg developed and how did the name come about?

   Digg was started in September 2004 as a personal project of Kevin Rose’s. At that time, Kevin was working at TechTV. In addition to his job as a journalist, he was also a technophile and had interesting technology side projects that he was running out of his house. He was a big fan of MacRumors.com and was interested in how some of their “Page 2” stories that didn’t quite make the home page, were still really interesting. That got him thinking about all the great content available that no one could see and how it would be interesting to give more control back to the community.

   In this sense, digg started out as a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote content without the external editorial control. After a very short time, Kevin realized that he was on to something, as digg was becoming a great resource for breaking news stories, sometimes even before traditional media.

2. Today, how many developers do you have working on the website?

   digg has 15 employees today, and of those 3 are PHP developers, and there are a bunch of other people that support that development effort.

3. (If this is alright to answer) What version of php do you guys use and what database system?

   PHP v5
   MySQL
   All on Debian Linux

4. What does the html comment in the page header mean?

   I have no idea. It is something that the developers put in there for debugging.

5. Do you guys use a version control system when developing the website? If so, which one?

   Subversion

6. How long has digg been in development, even since before it went public?

   1.5 months before we launched the public beta.

7. (Once again, if this can be answered) What is the average bandwidth usage of the site, since it is now in the top 500 websites?

   I prefer not to answer this.

8. What are some planned additions for the future?

   Soon, we’ll be expanding outside of the tech news category into areas like science news, political news, etc. In this sense, we’ll be developing new areas for digg that will be similar to sections of a newspaper. We’ll also be adding more tools and functionality to the site. Our goal is to give users even more control and to provide real-time visibility into what’s happening on digg

9. (If this can be answered as well) How many servers does digg.com run to keep it responding quickly?

   With development servers, staging servers, live active digg servers and database servers – we have about 50 now…growing with great speed

10. How do you, a fellow employee, enjoy working with digg.com?

    digg.com are my friends, and we came together to realize my vision, so for that, I’m extremely grateful. So, not only is digg.com a great place to be, but the work that we do serves my community, so it’s quite an amazing opportunity that we’ve created for ourselves. digg’ success is a real testament to what can happen if you believe in yourself and follow your dreams.