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Alex Albrecht, left, tries to shield Kevin Rose's computer from the camera during a Diggnation taping in Elkridge. (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)
Alex Albrecht, one of the hosts of the popular video podcast Diggnation, wishes he'd picked a different beer. The selection he chose "tastes like beef jerky," he complains as he prepares for this week's show. "This is the worst beer ever," agrees his co-host, Kevin Rose.
The two unshaven hosts of the relatively long-running show might not be identifiable to the average person on the street, but they're famous online. Rose is the founder of Digg, the site where users vote on their favorite stories or items culled from around the Web. The site gets around 34 million visits a month.
The podcast, which draws on news items from the Web site, often features Albrecht and Rose knocking back a few cold ones. With laptops perched on their knees, they talk about the latest stories that have been creating buzz at Digg.
This week the duo moved their show -- usually taped in Rose's San Francisco apartment -- to the Washington area. They were parked on the sofa of Chris Hayes, a 20-year-old computer science student at the University of Maryland, who won a drawing to host the show from his living room. Or in Hayes's case, from his mom's living room in Elkridge.
The average show gets about 250,000 downloads, they say. By TV standards, that's not much of an audience. But online that's enough of a following for Diggnation to regularly crack into the most-downloaded lists at iTunes -- and it's popular enough to attract big-name advertisers such as Axe body spray, GoDaddy.com and Sony, which promotes its PlayStation Portable on the show.
The show has been compared to Wayne's World, the old Saturday Night Live spoof in which a couple of young guys hosted a public-access show from their basement. It's a comparison that sort of fits, though Wayne and Garth weren't known for going off on informed tangents about gadgets and technology.
Diggnation is a hit on the start-up Web video site called Revision3 that produces about a dozen such podcasts. "We're a full-fledged television network," said David Prager, the site's co-founder. Not all the shows are moneymakers, but Diggnation is "outrageously in the black," he said. Now Prager is working on deals to get Revision3 shows available as a download for Web-connected devices such as the Roku box for Netflix or the Xbox 360.
Albrecht, 32, grew up in the Washington area. His parents live in Vienna, and that's where he and the crew crashed last night. He has a degree in computer science, so of course he moved to Los Angeles in the hopes of making it as an actor.
Albrecht and Rose first met when they worked together, years ago, at a now-defunct cable channel called TechTV. The two had sometimes kicked around the idea of working on a project together, and when Apple launched a new podcasting feature they decided this was the development that they'd been waiting for. The Apple feature went online on a Thursday and the first Diggnation podcast was recorded the next day.
For Rose, 31, who is a geek celebrity for having founded Digg, the podcast is a side-gig for his real job as that site's head software architect. Next year, Rose said, he's hoping to roll out some tools that will link Digg users together by the kind of stories they like most. If you like pro-Obama stories, for example, you'll see more of those articles as the site notices your interests. Although it's popular, Digg isn't profitable. The company hopes to change that sometime next year, he said.
Three years on, the Diggnation podcast has been recorded in London, Tokyo -- and now Elkridge.
As Albrecht and Rose prepared to tape the show, the crew and their hosts were busy with keyboards clattering away as they Twittered, sent IMs, updated their Facebook status and checked their Gmail. Occasionally, an iPhone popped out of somebody's pocket for a quick consult. Partly, this seemed like a bit of show preparation; partly it seemed like this is how these guys spend most of their waking hours.
Hayes and a few friends who had dropped by appeared to be slightly star-struck at having the well-known geeks in the house. "I have nothing interesting to say to them but I'm still excited," typed one into his Dell.
The two hosts went over this week's topics, which were a fairly typical mix. There was a piece about a Hilton employee who sued the hotel chain after witnessing executives in an act of, well, inappropriate behavior, a story about a man who was arrested after police find crack, uh, after he becomes ill, followed by a list of the top ways a music application called Songbird is better than iTunes. As usual, the show was a clunky, stream-of-consciousness affair with a lot of side trips about, say, Rose's days as an employee at an Olive Garden.
Albrecht and Rose read a couple of letters from viewers at the end of the show. One was from Diggnation fan Andrew Walker, who wrote to credit Digg for his dog Yoshi's 15 minutes of fame.
Walker had made a video of Yoshi, a ferocious-looking Chihuahua who makes a bloodcurdling growl as it is dried off after a dip in the bathtub. The video had gone unnoticed on YouTube for a year before somebody posted it to Digg last summer. Now, the grouchy Chihuahua has been featured on such shows as "Inside Edition" and "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno." Such is the reach of Digg and Diggnation.
And, with that, it was a wrap. Hayes's mom had been sitting on the sofa the whole time, watching the show. "It was interesting," was about all she had to say about the show when asked afterward. She said it with a polite smile.
The latest episode of Diggnation, No. 180, hit the Web yesterday.
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