Kevin Rose: “Digg traffic has grown by over 40% since July”

Kevin Rose kicked off the Future of Web Apps Conference in London this morning, on the topic “The Future of News”. He started out by asking several broad ‘unanswered questions’, which he went on to detail in his keynote.

• How do we create an experience YOU enjoy?
• How can it get better with your participation?
• How can we empower people to share information with people that want that information?
• How can we improve the conversation?

Kevin described the gap he wanted Digg to fill as being placed between the filters of people you know, and an unfiltered mass audience. This gap, said Rose, would be filled by Digg in future with its recommendation engine, providing an intersection of your news, and news from ‘diggers like you’.

Digg’s traffic has grown by over 40% since July with the recommendation engine being the fuel for this, and they now plan to open up their taxonomy to allow dynamic grouping – the aim with this is to promote conversation amongst similar users.

Thus, a group can ‘reject’ a spammer or someone who is interrupting, and include those who make valuable contributions. In this way, an individual can ‘show their impact’ to other users – as you Digg, it shows you the number of people like you who, in a dynamic group, you are sharing this with, or the number whom you are ‘denying’ seeing the story if you are ‘burying’ things you don’t think deserve an airing. Nice tool – why would you want to disappoint 3,421 people like yourself?

Digg also want to be a conduit to other places, like Twitter, Facebook etcetera. They are also developing and extending the recommendation API and tools for publishers. My immediate thought was that the publishers might welcome this, but it would depend who was branding (or monetising) the end delivery to the consumer.

Responding to questions at the end of his presentation, Rose revealed that Digg has plans to develop internationally, with Rose saying this will be a big initiative next year. One big reason for taking their last round of funding was expanding internationally to take on the local ‘Digg clones’ in the likes of Germany and Spain.”We’ll be moving servers overseas, and by Q4 2009, we will be addressing international markets.”

So watch out, looks like the Diggers will be the future of news. So, please Digg this story…