Diggnation
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Diggnation is a weekly podcast hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. Its main purpose is to discuss the top stories from Digg, the social bookmarking website developed by Rose. Every week, Kevin and Alex review beers at the opening of the show. Revision3 also hosts video versions of the podcasts, also known as videocasts.
Diggnation was originally named "The Digg Podcast" but was renamed in episode 2 as Diggnation. It was named Diggnation because Kevin Rose's friend David Prager (The Screen Savers, This Week in Tech) originally wanted to call the site “Diggnation”, but Kevin wanted a simpler name. He chose the name "Digg", because users are able to "dig" stories, out of those submitted, up to the front page. The site was called “Digg” instead of “Dig” because the domain name “dig.com” was previously registered by the Walt Disney Company.
Episode #14 of Diggnation marked a new milestone for podcasting. The Diggnation team collaborated with Dolby Laboratories to test "true" surround sound. The show was the first podcast ever to be (partly) recorded with this technology, which creates the illusion of surround sound by actually recreating what would happen to the waveforms from different directions (delay, tone, and volume differences between the ears) and playing it through headphones. Thus totally accurate recreations of soundspace can be created. The technology mentioned here was only used in Episode 14, though Kevin and Alex have expressed interest in using it again.
One of the more known aspects of Diggnation is that they occasionally do live shows. These shows have been hosted at CES, Cre824, San Francisco, E3, San Diego and more.
As a rule, Diggnation episodes are filmed every Thursday, posted for Revision3 members on Saturday and the video is released to the general public the next Tuesday. Although that "rule" has partly been ignored by the crew recently, the general public still gets a new episode released on a Tuesday. However, the videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so it is not illegal for them to be re-distributed early to non-subscribers. The video and audio versions of the podcast can be obtained at the iTunes music store, sites like DiggDown and often from torrents, before being released to the full public.
On the 16th of August, 2006, it was announced that Diggnation won the 2006 Podcast Award for best technology podcast. The winner of 2005 was TWiT, which Kevin Rose also is a part of.
