TechTV used to be a great network. When Leo Laporte was hosting the screen savers TV show that was only available on DirecTV, it was full of interesting and useful computer-related information. It was great. I used to leave it on for hours on end and enjoy it quite a lot. TechTV is no more, but before it was demolished, the network wasl called the G4 network and was sort of a kids-only version of its previous life. They concentrated on getting rating and pandoring to the lowest common denominator instead of focusing on the viewers who used to watch the old TechTV. Leo Laporte was no longer hosting the show and a kid named Kevin Rose took over as the host. Kevin had done some “dark tipper’ spots on the previous show showing how to “hack” stuff - which was really just Slashdot posts that he acted out. He made a few videos about his hacking excapades, threw in some cool audio and people started to believe that since he could sniff-out an open wifi signal or mod his xbox that he was really something special.
When G4 was no more, he went into limbo and was bouncing around from gig to gig when he wanted to try a social experiment which turned out to be digg.com (what he’s currently known for). Kevin’s digg.com idea was a good idea, but was nothing more than a voting mechanism on top of a social news site like Slashdot and many others at the time. The real fact is that digg.com would’ve been not that great if it were not for his name getting mentioned to all of the previous TechTV fans that were still in the loop with Leo and the gang, traffic to digg.com would have been a trickle compared to what it was (a huge hit). Digg.com is one of the top-50 websites (probably top-20) nowadays and he has noone to thank for it but the old TechTV fanbase and Leo and gang. Kevin is supposedly worth millions with his ownership in Digg.com, but not really worth anything until Digg.com is sold, which will be when its value is much less than it is right now.
Kevin and his friend Alex do a podcast called diggnation which review the top several stories on digg.com that made it to the front page. They edit the stories that they review, so many times Kevin promotes articles that he posted himself.
My beef with Kevin Rose is that he’s now got an ego. If you listen to the diggnation podcast and if you’ve watched his rise to stardom, you’ll realize that he sits on the shoulders of giants and doesn’t really provide any real value or personality to anything. Alex mainly carries Kevon on the diggnation podcast. Kevin loves Tea, not beer as it was originally thought. Kevin grew up in Vegas and brags to have done a bunch of stupid stuff in his youth, but according to his stories, it’s not anything much more than any normal kid has done when he was young and stupid. I myself grew up in Colorado and have equal stupid stories and I didn’t have half of the resources that Kevin did to make bad decisions living in Las Vegas, NV. Kevin is not a ‘dark hacker’. Kevin is not a rebel without a cause. Kevin is not a millionaire … and Kevin is in no way good with the ladies as he insinuates in the diggnation podcast (listen to his ‘dating advice’ on the latest few diggnations). Mainly, he’s probably an ex-linux guy who knows a little about mysql and php, got lucky with digg.com using his popularity from TechTV and Leo and now has a big head.
Just typing this, I think that I’m going to stop wasting my time listening to diggnation - it’s an hour out of my day. Alex is a great personality - coming from the Hollywood section of L.A., I can see listening to something of his, but Kevin’s lack of substance is not worth listening to anymore in my opinion. Instead, listen to Alex’s podcast or just make an RSS feed of the top digg.com or slashdot items (they’re mostly the same anyway) and safe an hour of your life once a week.
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