Digg
Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson (who serves as CEO), all of whom currently play an active role in the management of the site.

“We started working on developing the site back in October 2004,” Kevin Rose told Richard MacManus of ZDNet. “We started toying around with the idea a couple of months prior to that, but it was early October when we actually started creating what would become the beta version of digg. The site launched to the world on December 5th 2004.”

Although the domain name of Digg is registered under the name Jerimiah Udy, he is not one of the original founders of Digg, but rather a friend of Kevin Rose’s. The domain name was registered under Jerimiah’s name because Rose did not want others to know that he was associated with Digg. He wanted Digg to stand on its own and not become a message board for all things he personally stood for.

Kevin Rose’s friend David Prager (The Screen Savers, This Week in Tech) originally wanted to call the site “Diggnation”, but Kevin wanted a simpler name. He chose the name “Digg”, because users are able to “dig” stories, out of those submitted, up to the front page. The site was called “Digg” instead of “Dig” because the domain name “dig.com” was previously registered by the Walt Disney Company.

The original design was free of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Ries. But as Digg became more popular, Google AdSense was added to generate revenue. The site was updated in July 2005, to “Version 2.0″. The new Digg featured a friends list, the ability to “digg” a story without being redirected to a “success” page, and a new interface designed by Daniel Burka, of the web design company silverorange. After the redesign, some users complained about the lack of the simplistic, minimalist layout used in the original version of Digg. The site developers have stated that in future versions a more minimalist design will likely be employed. On Monday June 26, 2006 V3 of Digg was released with specific categories for Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming as well as a View All section where all categories are merged. A Sports category was added about a month later.
Even though Digg is depicted as a user-driven website with non-hierarchical editorial control, there have been recent complaints of intervention by editors to promote certain stories, bypassing the choice of users. The same editors are accused of hiding these facts by censoring stories which mention them and by banning users who have posted them. Founder Kevin Rose responded by blaming the promotion on users rather than staff. An exposé by tech blog Forever Geek uncovered what it felt was obvious intervention by editors to promote or bury certain stories, bypassing the choice of users. It also implicated Kevin Rose himself for digging the same exact stories in the same exact order as the users, and therefore being complicit in the promotion. A statistical analysis of the diggs showed that an average of 7-8 of the users dugg each others stories within the first 24 diggs per story that made the front page, and Kevin Rose dugg 28% of these stories within the first 24 diggs. The accusations were addressed extensively by Rose in an appearance on This Week in Tech. On that podcast, as well as on the official Digg blog, he stated that the charges stemmed from a coincidence (two stories that Rose was found to have been the 17th person to “digg”), and that the whole snafu arose after ForeverGeek users were banned for artificially inflating the digg counts of their stories.