Where's Wil?

Kevin Rose gave a great speech at FoWA, and whilst he didn't have too much to announce - aside from the fact that Digg will be supporting OpenID - I wanted to just extract a few quotes from his speech that I think were fairly interesting.

Why come to Digg?
"I talked about this with Commander Taco, the guy that runs Slashdot. I was like, why do people submit these stories to you? Why do they send this stuff in? He told me that people want to share with the community what they believe to be important. What they think should be heard amongst the world. They want to see their name in lights, in our case, their little icon on the front page, so that everyone else can see it."

"On Digg, I love the fact there can be some really big tech story on the front page, then next to it there's going to be a story about a monkey with 12 nipples. I love that. They know thatcCNN isn't going to have the monkey with 12 nipples, they come back for the crazy mix of stories here."

"People make a big deal out of gaming on Digg. Alright, if you have a hundred user acounts digging something then it's going to make the front page, that's the way the system works - but if it sucks, it's going to get buried really quickly. Seo's have been tring to do this with Google and Yahoo all the time, and so now it's just a division of our company, something that we have to continue to grow."

The Community
"Look, any time you throw 900,000 people into a room they're not all going to get along, they're not all going to behave. What we have to work on, is how can you create tools to enable the community to moderate this amount of users?"

"It's important to allow the community to do this stuff, because paid people don't scale. What, are you going to employ 50 people, then 100 people, then 150? Netscape has this model, and Calacanis, and... whatever."

The Future
"We want to allow the community to attach things to a story, so that if someone marks it as lame, or inaccurate, we can really start a debate. Attach related links, tags, we want to allow people to swarm around the story and discuss it."

"It's important to us to get to the place where we can make recommendations - not just about stories, but about true friends that you can hook up with. You don't realise how many people you're agreeing with on a regular basis."

"We're working on a flash toolkit that ties into our API, so that publishers can use this toolkit to see what people are doing with your stories. If you want a swarm for your own particular website, that's something we'll be releasing soon."

Kevin also noted that Digg is working on allowing you to export your friends networks and your attention data, as well as ways for the site to play nicely with Delicious, Reddit, Newsvine and other similar sites.

Good stuff!