Kevin Rose came to visit

Digg founder Kevin Rose is in town and the people at FutureNow (which is part of the BBC’s training and development function) invited him in to speak to people from around the organisation. Interesting presentation but, seriously, not that interesting. In fact, to be honest, I found it puzzling to note how little has changed at Digg and (apparently) how little of consequence is planned for the site. 85 people work there and most are developers. What do they actually do?

The interesting bits from my notes: the whole site, including contributions, is licenced under Creative Commons so you can lift and reuse anything. This is encouraged, in fact. The site’s recommendation engine, which is a new feature produced a 40% increase in diggs. Blimey. I bet they wished they’d launched it earlier. The Digg API will soon allow sites like the BBC’s which embed Digg features to direct traffic to related stories from within the site alongside digged (dugg?) items.

Digg, of course, remains a greeat example of the kind of external site that the BBC (and other creators of content) should make use of, link to and promote as a tool for users while never ever attempting to duplicate or improve upon. Just don’t go there.