Digg.com Chicago Town Hall Wrap-Up: Developing sub-Diggs, partnering with Tribune, Kevin Rose outdrinks Jay Adelson

Digg.com, one of the web’s top destinations for tech news, political opinion and funny videos threw a party in Wrigleyville Wednesday evening, drawing a male-heavy, youngish crowd of nearly 300 avid members of its user community for free drinks, announcements from the Digg team and a chance to mingle with site founder and web celebrity Kevin Rose.

Major public announcements included a new partnership with the Chicago Tribune and a revamped online store for Digg.com merchandise. Digg CEO Jay Adelson also spoke about a new feature in the pipeline that will let users create their own sub-Digg’s for topics of their choosing.

Adelson was tight-lipped, however, when asked about recent rumors that Digg was being acquired by search giant Google.com for $200 million.

“There is no word,” he said. “We commented on one of these rumors before and it got us in trouble. There is nothing to say.”

Earlier that night, Rose made light of the situation, announcing from the stage that “We’re buying Google.”

Photo by AbsalonPrieto

New Feature In the Works: Roll your own Digg

Digg.com will soon let members create and manage their own Digg sub-sites, according to Adelson, who said the feature was about 6 months from launch (Update - July 27, 2008: The official word from Digg is that the feature is still in its early planning stage and has no scheduled release date). Adelson said the move will open Digg up to new verticals and make it possible for stories that wouldn’t make the cut on the main Digg site to find an audience. Users will be able to control the threshold for submitted articles being promoted to the front page of these.

“We need to help the guy with five diggs,” he said, explaining that the sub-sites would take “about 100 things” into consideration beyond just the number of people voting for specific stories.

Digg.com’s competitors, Reddit.com and Mixx.com, both considerably smaller in audience, have launched similar features in recent months.

Chicago Tribune make strong showing on home turf, a look at their Digg campaign

The Chicago Tribune’s online staff had a healthy contingent at the event.

That same day, the newspaper unveiled a new Digg.com widget on its front page listing its most popular stories on Digg. The new widget, not seen on any other major U.S. paper, is no surprise. More so than any other newspaper in the country, the Tribune has aggressively courted the Digg community, using a Twitter.com account to send news text messages asking readers to vote for Tribune stories on Digg in addition to breaking news and weather updates from their newsroom.

The Tribune has sent its Twitter followers to Digg 29 times in the last three months, according to Twitter, with every campaign resulting in a front page story and the thousands of pageviews and ad views that follow. The effort to raise the paper’s presence on Digg has been a success according to employees in attendance at the meetup. Pageviews are up at the Tribune, they said.

When asked if he thought the Chicago Tribune was “gaming” Digg through its efforts, an oft-decried practice of in which parties artificially manipulate the voting process to promote their own work, one staffer said he didn’t think so “because everything we’re doing is transparent.”

A Digg.com search turns up 207 ChicagoTribune.com stories that have made the front page in the last three and a half years. 44 of these stories were submitted by Digg user “Colonel Tribune” or by the personal account of Daniel Honigman, the Tribune wunderkind employee who oversees the Colonel Tribune Digg and Twitter accounts. The Colonel Tribune account has submitted 441 stories to Digg.com in the last year, Honigman has submitted 135 under his own account. The Tribune’s most dugg story? “Facebook” a modern day romance,” a facebook-themed feature from the Tribune’s recently-launched humor blog, Head Candy, reminiscent of popular humor site CollegeHumor.com, which regularly runs very similar features. Featuring a humor blog on the front page of ChicagoTribune.com is also a very different move from the rest of the industry.

By comparison, the Washington Post (which got into the humor game years ago by buying up The Onion), a newspaper with similar print circulation, has had 845 stories featured on the site’s front page in the last three and a half years. Its most dugg story? “Marijuana does not cause cancer.”

The New York Times, with a print circulation twice that of the Tribune’s has had 1656 stories featured on Digg’s front page. Its most dugg story? “Gonzales has resigned at Attorney General.”

The Chicago Sun-Times, meanwhile, has had 26 articles featured on Digg.

The Scene:

Photo by AbsalonPrieto

The line began forming on Clark St. around 6:00 P.M., stretched down the block, but paled in comparison to the multi-block snake of fans who greeted Digg at a recent New York City Town Hall. The crowd consisted largely of avid Digg users and fans of Kevin Rose’s weekly video show, DiggNation. Attendees exchanged twitter user names and clicked away on iPhones as they waited for the doors to open.

Photo by Christian B. Sass

Smart Bar offered a dark, clubby atmosphere for the event. Too dark, says local tech blogger Blagica Bottigliero who details other quibbles on the Chicago Tech Report.

Photo by Christian B. Sass

These girls snapped about 40 pictures of Kevin Rose while he was on stage.

Photo by Christian B. Sass

As Bottigliero said, Kevin Rose proved himself to be an expert floater. Posing for pictures with longtime fans throughout the night.

Photo by mofo269

This gentleman (read his response here) sowed seeds of confusion throughout the evening, by looking more or less exactly like Rose. More than one person approached him to talk, noticed it wasn’t Rose, and moved on.

Photo by Christian B. Sass

Rose and Adelson took the stage early in the evening to welcome the Chicago diggers, invite them to participate in a raffle to select the new model for Digg t-shirts on their new web store and to encourage them to test out the site’s new recommendation engine feature. They also gave a shout-out to the Tribune’s new Digg widget.

Photo by AbsalonPrieto

Later in the evening, Rose and Adelson returned to the stage for a trivia contest and to chug beers at the crowd’s behest.

Photo by Christian B. Sass

Rose brandishing his now empty beer. He bested Adelson, who downed only 3/4 of his.

Photo by Christian B. Sass

Attendees clamor for Digg swag during the trivia contest.

Following the beer chugging competition, at least one Digger pushed through the crowd to show off his own beer chugging abilities. Despite the inherent “nerdiness” of a social news site focused on Technology, like Digg, the meetup at times had the atmosphere of a frat paty. For every scruffy plaid-wearing attendee working as a graphic designer or at a local startup, there was a lantern-jawed, white-shirted accountant with a popped-collar. This speaks to the crossover appeal of Rose who makes a point of his love for beer on his DiggNation shows and for Digg itself, which features less and less tech news on its home page every day in favor of general interest stories.

More Chicago Digg Town Hall Photos

Photo by Christian B. Sass

Photo by Christian B. Sass

Photo by AbsalonPrieto

Photo by AbsalonPrieto

Photo by z3ro1

About Digg.com:

Digg.com lets visitors share links to news stories, photos and videos found across the web, with the most voted on (the most “dugg”) stories surfacing to the front page. Founded in late 2004 by 20-something techies with ties to the Tech TV television network (now know as G4 TV), Digg.com has grown into an online news juggernaut, serving 19 million unique visitors (half a million from the Chicago area) each month according to Quantcast. In the last two years, nearly every blog, newspaper, magazine and television web site on the internet has incorporated Digg links into their site in the hope that their content will catapult to the front page. A story on the front page of Digg can send tens of thousands of visitors to a site in minutes. Despite Digg’s popularity, the site is often criticized for being less democratic than it claims to be. Studies have shown that less than one percent of Digg’s users contribute more than 80 percent of the material that makes the front page.