Posts Tagged ‘Jay Adelson’

Yesterday Revision3 co-founder Jay Adelson spoke at the Failcon Conference in San Francisco on the subject of failure – not that of his current company, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in May – but of his previous venture, Digg, which he left in April 2005 after supposedly turning down multiple offers to sell. When he opened the floor to questions from the audience Adelson had to react, in real time, to some unsettling news: an audience member had just read in TechCrunch that Digg laid off 25 employees – that’s 37% off its staff.

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Matt Williams, who left Amazon.com to claim the CEO chair at Digg at the end of August, introduced himself in a post on the Digg Blog, in which he revealed that the bury button will soon be unburied.

Williams succeeded former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, and Kevin Rose assumed the title of chief architect.

From Williams’ post:

It’s certainly been an eventful first month on the job. As many of you know, the launch of Digg v4 didn’t go smoothly, and we’re deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process. Thank you for your patience and your extremely candid feedback — we hear you loud and clear.

Recently, we’ve been reinstating a number of the features that many of you loved about Digg. In the past two weeks, we’ve brought back the “Upcoming” section, started restoring user profiles from the previous version of Digg, and made small but important tweaks to the site, including better pagination. In the next few weeks, we’ll bring back the bury button, restore all user profiles (including comment and submission history), add filters and navigation for videos and images, provide a tool for users to report comment violations, and update the Top News algorithm and overall site design based upon your feedback. The result will hopefully be a much better Web site experience.

I’d also like to share some insight beyond what you may have seen or heard in the press. Despite the changes to our platform at the end of August, there were still 23 million unique visitors worldwide using Digg last month. Digg today is a much faster Web site, operating on an open-source platform. And with the launch of My News, you now have more personalized control on Digg by filtering news with the help of friends and others you choose to follow.

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CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who got his own CNN show based on his prolific use of social media, is going Hollywood.

Sanchez has been asked to moderate a panel at the Recording Academy’s Social Media Rock Starts Summit ahead of this weekend’s Grammy awards.

The panel includes Digg CEO Jay Adelson, Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable, Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music and Tumblr founder David Karp.

This afternoon’s conversation, held at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, will spotlight the intersection of music and the digital space focusing on the evolution of social media and how it has radically changed the way music fans consume and share news and information about their favorite artists.

Actor Jared Leto, who will also participate on the panel, will be on Sanchez’s CNN show “Rick’s List” today. Leto spent part of his youth in Haiti — his parents were missionaries — so expect the two to talk about the situation there.

> Update: Leto won’t be on CNN, after all. But he is still part of the panel which is being streamed on CNN.com.

> Update 2: Turns out Leto did make it for his interview on Sanchez’s show. As did Jody Whatley.