Rich Miner, partner, Google Ventures (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

The rise of Google’s venture capital arm is an interesting one, because unlike a lot of emerging VC firms, Google Ventures isn’t lacking in capital. Instead, the firm has to prove that it’s not just an offshoot of Google, but rather a VC firm in its own right that can compete with other top-tier firms for access to the best — and potentially most profitable — founders.

“We are not your typical strategic corporate fund,” the firm’s enterprise partner Karim Faris told Forbes, in a mantra you hear often from the group.

One way Google Ventures is working to attract young founders is the addition of young, visible partners like former Digg founder Kevin Rose and blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler. While it boasts Android founder Rich Miner as a partner, Miner is based in Boston, and the addition of Rose and Siegler can help Google Ventures build up its local presence and visibility. So far, Google Ventures has invested in a large number of companies including Nest, DocuSign, HomeAway, and Nextdoor.

Digg founder Kevin Rose, now a Google Ventures partner.

One way Google Ventures is trying to distinguish itself from its Valley peers is by preaching a more hands-on approach to investing. Unlike the traditional model, where partners dispense advice to portfolio companies at board meetings or when the companies ask for it, Google Ventures has set up more of a lab-like atmosphere in Mountain View. It has designers, marketers, engineers and other staff on hand to assist and advise the portfolio companies however they need it.

This strategy has worked for firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which also launched around the same time as Google Ventures in 2009 and was originally derided for its flashy, PR-powered operation. But it has quickly become a top-tier firm in a short period of time, investing in companies like Facebook, Instagram, Github, Pinterest, and Twitter.

In November, Google Ventures announced that it now plans to invest $300 million a year, compared to more typical VC firms that invest about $200 million to $500 million over the course of several years. There’s no question that having the resources and support of Google behind the firm has an impact.

“We were lucky. Larry and I, we just wrote up the check,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told GigaOM in an interview at the time.

When Google Ventures announced plans to increase the size of its fund, managing partner Bill Maris said Page had asked him what he would do with $1 billion. But with the firm already investing in about 80 companies a year and providing resources like engineering, design, and marketing guidance, he worried more about how to scale that kind of operation and provide enough partner attention for the companies that need it. So adding some new partners is a step in that direction.

Building a VC firm that can compete at the highest levels with the likes of Sequoia and Greylock only four years after launch isn’t an easy task, even if the firm had one of the hottest names in technology as partners. But if Google’s forays into driverless cars and Glass are any indication, the company has no problem setting its sights high.

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Cozy, a San Francisco-based startup founded in March, plans to announce Thursday that it’s raised $1.5 million in seed funding to standardize the application and rental payment processes for landlords nationwide. The round was led by the Social+Capital Partnership, and included investments from Google Ventures (Kevin Rose was behind the deal), Tim Ferriss, Jason Calacanis and Gary Vaynerchuk.

The site, which had been testing its product this year and is now accepting members for its beta product, attacks two key points of interaction between landlord and tenants: the application process and monthly rent payments. The founders hope that standardizing these interactions will benefit both landlord and tenant and provide a digital record for both down the line. Cozy is available nationwide, and so far, has seen the most interest from landlords in the Bay area, Portland, and New York City.

The founders have created a shorter, more succinct rental application that asks only what landlords need to know about applicants and tries to eliminate unnecessary or repetitive questions. CEO Gino Zahnd explained in an interview that most rental applications ask far more questions than landlords actually want to know, and provide details best left for the actual lease. Zahnd said that most landlords just want to know if a tenant will pay his rent on time.

The other aspect of Cozy’s product helps tenants looking to prove their competency to landlords. Cozy allows landlords using the app to collect and track monthly payments online, and provides renters with digital proof of their reliable payments, something which isn’t reflected in credit reports. The process allows landlords of multiple buildings or apartments to manage payments without using paper.

Cozy is led by Zahnd and John Bragg, who worked together at Kosmix, which is now Walmart Labs, and then at Seabright Studios, a user experience firm. Previously, Zahnd worked for Flickr, Splunk, and Adaptive Path, and Bragg with Capital One.

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SmartThings is trying to raise $250,000, and it just got a boost in the form of a tweet from Kevin Rose, the co-founder of Digg and now at Google Ventures, that has helped it raise $60,000 in just a few hours since its launch. SmartThings has an app environment, a SmartHub that connects and houses the intelligence for the sensors and will develop sensor kits. One plugs into a wall outlet and will then turn things on or off when a certain online is taken (every time you get a new Twitter follower your lights blink on and off).

Other kits include a presence sensor (is your hamster still in his cage?), a motion sensor (the hamster must have run into the upstairs bedroom) and an open/shut sensor for doors, windows or cabinets (quick that bedroom window is open, don’t let Fluffy escape). The plan right now, according to the Kickstarter page for SmartThings, is to use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Z-wave, Zigbee (and maybe cellular) for connectivity. So if Fluffy leaves your yard, he may be lost if SmartThings can’t work a deal with a carrier.

SmartThings promises more sensors and kits, and as you can see the system is designed as both a home automation-style system where you use your connected devices to control physical elements, but also as a link between the real and online world, where actions taken online can have a physical impact. Another Kickstarter project called reaDIYmate tried to link the online and offline world with a line of toys that took action when certain online events triggered them.

I think these sorts of projects are one of the most interesting areas of the web (real world?) right now because they will help bridge the places where we spend most of our physical energy to the place where many of us expend our emotional and mental energy. They also represent the beginning of user interfaces that are based on context. Earlier this year I wrote:

And yes, there are probably far more complex ways to cross the Web–real world divide. But by bringing this to a wider audience and by making it fun, these companies are on the bleeding edge of how we’ll interact with our devices going forward.

So while we’re busy trying to make computers intelligent, projects like this one are an alternative step to making people feel like their computers are intelligent, by giving our machines more context about where we are and what we’re doing without ever sitting at a keyboard or touching a screen.

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“When I look at some of the early stuff we did in 2004 and early 2005, I’m proud of that,” he said Wednesday evening at the Founders Showcase event in Mountain View. “There are a lot of things where we were the first company to launch some of these social features on the web.”

Rose took the long view of his role at Digg Wednesday night (as Om did in the wake of Digg’s sale), reminiscing on some of the challenges he faced as a new entrepreneur and coming of age around the same time as other companies who eventually did the social-media thing better:

“I grew up in between Facebook and Twitter,” Rose said. “People took what we created and innovated on top of our creation to make something better. And it’s tough to maintain that,” he said, citing the realization that came when he heard people talking about news they’d seen on Twitter, rather than news they might have previously seen on Digg.

Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of use.

“We ran into these huge problems, and didn’t have generalists who could go up and down the stack,” he said, noting that it was a problem he worked to correct at Milk, his next startup, and urges young companies to think about.

One of the best aspects of his current gig at Google Ventures, Rose said, is that he can apply some of the wisdom he gained in his Digg and startup years to help younger entrepreneurs, who he cautioned against taking on too much financing too early.

“I don’t think you should give away a lot of your company,” he said, noting that he liked bringing on advisors, as long as they were willing to invest some of their own funds in the company’s success.

Rose spoke highly of New York-based incubator Betaworks, which acquired the remaining assets of Digg for $500,000. That didn’t really reflect the value of the company’s parts, Rose said, which were acquired by companies like The Washington Post and LinkedIn. Rose said Digg received higher offers but picked Betaworks because it thought those executives had the best vision for what to do with Digg, and he thanked the investors for being willing to go along.

“We had a site with a lot of visitors, and when we sort of put out a word that this was up for sale, there were a lot of companies that offered more money. There were spam sites wanted to make it a link farm, and a bunch of properties that would have really screwed things up,” he said. “But if there’s any company that understands the real-time nature of the web, it’ll be the people that brought us all these really cool things like bit.ly and Chartbeat.”

Rose said he’s seen mock-ups of the new Digg, and he likes it.

“I love the design. It’s very simple, and there’s a lot of emphasis on real-time,” he said “It’s very bare bones, but in a good way. They’ve killed a lot of features and bloat that’s grown up over the years, and they plan on launching a very bare bones system and then over the next couple weeks increase the functionality.”

An audience member asked Rose what he hopes his legacy will be, and he thought about it for a minute.

“When it comes to investing, I want you to be able to look through my portfolio and say, ‘That could have been big.’ They might not all make it, but at least they could have been something really cool,” he said. “I want to do Pinterest when it was Pinterest, not a clone. Big ideas and shaking things up is my passion.”

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The Digg Townhall meeting broadcast live from the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado. 2008. Photo courtesy of Eric Magnuson, via Flickr

Having spent a major part of the week sitting on a beach, practically disconnected to the incessant drumbeat of the news cycle, it was hardly surprising that I missed yesterday’s hoopla about Digg (or whatever was left of it) being acquired by Betaworks for around $500,000 and some equity. Betaworks is going to use the brand (and its traffic) to resuscitate its News.me app. Earlier, The Washington Post acquired some of the talent from Digg for about $12 million.

Failure, throughout ages, has been a reason for a public spectacle. So why should it be any different when it comes to Digg, one of the more iconic web companies since the dot-com bust at the turn of the century? It is hardly a surprise that much of the commentary around Digg has focused on the remarkable failure of the company.

A lot of attention has been devoted to Digg’s bad decisions – not selling out to Google, bad technology choices, aping other social networks or essentially misreading & mistreating their community. I don’t disagree with any (or all) of those arguments because they are right. Even back in early 2009, it was quite evident that the changing nature of the web was going to spell the end of Digg as we know it.

If the yardstick of success is making money for the founders, employees and the investors, then Digg will go down in the annals of web history as a colossal failure. However, if your yardstick of success is defined by a company or a product being a change agent and an instigator, then Digg was a smashing success. It is maybe a failed new-media company, but it is also a pioneer that changed the media landscape not by creating anything, but instead by putting the people in charge of what was media. Like Flickr, it was a company that opened our eyes to the potential of the social web. It also reminded us that links are and will always be the atomic unit of the web.

Talking about a revolution

TV Anchor Leo Laporte crowd surfing at SxSW 2010 live taping of Digg Nation. Photo courtesy of John Pozadzides via Flickr. John P blogs at Onemansblog.com

Having spent more than a decade blogging and nearly twice as much time writing about technology, I have observed some of the well-known names in the industry make their moves.  No surprise, I got a courtside view into Digg and the people who made the company. I first met Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, when he worked for Tech.tv and I worked for Red Herring. Both companies were around the corner from each other. I met Kevin’s partner in Digg, Jay Adelson, when he was busy trying to grow Equinix. Later, Kevin’s other startup, Revision 3, produced and distributed The GigaOM Show.

These social connections allowed me to get to know a lot of people who worked at Digg. And all I can say is that during Digg’s heydays — 2007 to 2009 — the company had attracted some seriously smart people into its fold. Designers, engineers, growth hackers, community experts — Digg was for a while one of the coolest companies to work for as long as you were young, nerdy and totally obsessed about Digg. They had little or no regard for the legacy of media or the web and tried to keep inventing things they thought would be cool.

Later, that spirit of constant reinvention would come in handy for many of these kids — and they were really kids — in the future.  I just did a back-of-the-envelope count and ended up with more than a dozen startups that have been started by ex-Diggers. Here is a sampling of names I came across:

FantasyBook (acquired by Citizen Sports), Well.io, SimpleGeo (acquired by UrbanAirship), Sprint.ly, Toodoo, Circa, Fflick (acquired by YouTube/Google), Milk (acquired by Google), Fanvibe (acquired by beRecruited), ShindigSF, mojoLive, Kiip, Frugalo (acquired by Twitvid), Toobla (shutdown) and a bunch of others that are still in stealthmode. Others ex-Diggers have played big role at newer companies. Eventbrite team is chock full of ex-Diggers such as Ben Standefer. Matt Van Horn and Daniel Trinh are at Path, and Chas Edwards is now working for Luminate. The list goes on and on.  (See disclosure below)

The Mothership is calling.

In a discussion thread over on Facebook, Standefer pointed out that between 2007 and 2009, Digg moved what he calls “60 awesome engineers and startup people to SF from all across the country. A lot of those people wouldn’t be out here founding startups if Digg never moved them out here from wherever they used to live. “

Joe Stump (via CrunchBase)

Joe Stump, co-founder of SimpleGeo and now Sprint.ly wrote in an e-mail that “Digg was comprised mostly of people who were recruited from outside of the Valley into what was, at the time, beloved by the media, users, and internet.” He recruited engineers who moved from Michigan, Illinois, Washington.

“Our first engineer was from Nova Scotia, Eli (our second) lived in Maryland,” Stump said. “I think a lot of the magic, when you look back at who our early hires were (Matt Van Horn at age 22, Brian Wong at age 18, Jeff Hodsdon at 19, Danny Trinh at 19) you’ll find a few common traits.”

Many of these kids were fanboys who loved Digg and were essentially no different than the community there. Stump pointed out that the company took big gambles on these young kids who basically were ecstatic to be at Digg and very hungry to prove that they were worth the shot. Stump argues that he didn’t have the credentials of being a Lead Architect but the company gambled on him. It created a fierce desire to not screw up. “I think this culture of taking chances on young talent and, subsequently, giving them room to grow was an amazing thing,” Stump said.

We are the media

Daniel Burka with Kevin Rose. Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk via Flickr.

“For me, the key driving force at Digg was a sense of mission,” said Daniel Burka, a well-known designer who moved to San Francisco from Canada. Burka, who worked at Digg and later co-founded Milk Studios with Rose, pointed out that “during Digg’s first few years, I genuinely felt that we were pushing the boundaries of media, democracy, and technology.”

It is easy to forget that Digg played a big role in making media social. Digg put “ME” in media. “It’s easy to forget now, but media was incredibly unidirectional in the pre-web-two-oh era,” Burka wrote to me in an email. “Digg was one of the first powerful forums for participatory media, whether that was the ability determine what constituted the news of the day or to comment on any story told anywhere on the web. I’m sure you can hear the passion in my voice as I’m writing this. They were heady days… and, despite obvious shortcomings over time, Digg honestly did shift the media landscape in important ways.” Digg Spy and Digg Stack were too minor examples of how Digg tried to deal with what was essentially a precursor to today’s information deluge.

Back in the early part of this century, voting on content was a new way of making the web useful. Digging became part of web behavior and since then we have seen Facebook (likes), Twitter (retweets) and Google (+1) also incorporate that same behavior into their products. Tumblr has reblog and Pinterest has pins. And pretty much every consumer app now uses voting as a tool for quick engagement. Digg’s patents around voting were useful enough for LinkedIn to pay between $3.75 million to $4 million for them according to published reports.

Digg became such a driver of traffic to websites that it prompted even the most haloed brands — The New York Times, for example — to add “Digg” voting buttons on their stories. Today, it is common place to see Twitter, Facebook, Google and The Fancy chicklets all over the web. Digg, was the anabolic steroid of the web — tech blogs (including ourselves), Huffington Post-style publications, and others owed their rise to the top to Digg.

Whether media doyens want to admit it or not, Digg changed how a lot of media was created and shared. Top ten lists were popular on Digg and generated a lot of traffic (and by extension were good for low CPM advertising) so even the most established media companies embraced that. Headlines were crafted to get the highest amount of attention and votes on Digg.

Digg is gone, but it will always remain with us. In its defeat, it turned out to be a victor.

Disclosure: True Ventures, where I am a venture partner, is an investor in Kiip and UrbanAirship and was an investor in Milk Studios. True is also an investor in GigaOM. 

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Updated: Maybe it was the BusinessWeek cover that sealed Digg’s fate. When the social-sharing site was near the height of its popularity in 2006, the business magazine put founder Kevin Rose on the cover with the caption: “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.” That was the estimated value of the site at the time — based on some suspiciously bubble-like math — but it was also the point at which Digg started to decline, slowly at first and then more rapidly, followed by some disastrous redesigns and the departure of its founder. Today, New York-based incubator Betaworks announced that it has acquired the remaining assets of the company, and according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the purchase price was just $500,000.

Update: While Betaworks may have paid $500,000 in cash for what was left of Digg, the total value of the company’s assets at the end of its life is apparently closer to $20 million, according to a number of reports. TechCrunch says that the Washington Post paid $12 million to acquire most of the development team, and LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for patents that the company had on some of its social features. The New York Times has also reported that part of the Betaworks deal was “single-digit millions” worth of equity in the incubator. Meanwhile, in an interview with the WSJ, Rose said Digg failed because “social media grew up,” and the Digg founder has also written about the acquisition on his Google+ page.

Betaworks, the incubator behind companies such as Bitly and Chartbeat, said in a blog post that it plans to merge the remaining assets of Digg with News.me — a Betaworks startup whose focus is news discovery, and was recently spun off as a separate entity under CEO Jake Levine. The core of Digg’s development team left in May to join WaPo Labs, the research arm of the Washington Post, and according to the Wall Street Journal report, CEO Matt Williams (who took over from Kevin Rose in 2010) will join Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Said the Betaworks post:

Digg is one of the great internet brands, and it has meant a great deal to millions of users over the years. It was a pioneer in community-driven news. We are turning Digg back into a startup… the News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about.

In many ways, Digg was eclipsed by the whole social-networking phenomenon, which was just starting to build into a massive wave when Kevin Rose appeared on the BusinessWeek cover. Facebook had recently broken out of its university-only mode, and Twitter had begun to fulfill much of the link-sharing purpose that Digg and other communities such as Reddit originally had. In 2010, Digg launched an ambitious redesign aimed at adding more social and Twitter-style features, and it also added special tools for publishers in an attempt to get mainstream media sites to push their stories to Digg first. But those changes irritated most of the site’s hardcore users, and they turned on it.

An attempt to reinvent both Digg and News.me

The merger marks an attempt to reinvent News.me as well: the Betaworks startup — which recently launched a mobile app that it hoped would become “an Instagram for news” — was originally created as a partnership between Betaworks and developers at the New York Times, and later bought by Betaworks. Like Digg, the idea behind News.me was to use social behavior around link-sharing (as well as algorithms developed by Bitly to track the popularity of shortened links being shared on Twitter and elsewhere) to filter the news for users in a more social way. But the iPad app didn’t get much traction and the service has lost ground to other solutions such as Flipboard and Zite.

Digg’s history of more than 350 million “diggs” and 28 million story submissions, combined with the knowledge that Bitly has from its database of shared links, could help power a new recommendation engine within News.me — or at least that seems to be the hope. In a comment that Matt Williams posted to the Digg blog, Kevin Rose said of Borthwick:

John understands the real-time nature of the web and how to capture and surface trends as they occur. Given his experience with bit.ly, news.me, and Chartbeat I can’t wait to see what he does with Digg.

Rose left the site last year to start his own startup incubator called Milk, which released a single mobile-sharing app called Oink and then abruptly closed its doors, and Rose later joined Google’s financing arm, Google Ventures. Matt Williams tried to fix what was left of Digg, and there were reports that traffic had started to recover somewhat (it still has 7 million unique visitors a month), but then the entire development team left en masse to join WaPo Labs and it became obvious that Digg was no more.

At one point, Digg reportedly got an acquisition offer from Google of $200 million, but turned it down to focus on building the site as a standalone service. During its heyday — when websites used to talk about “the Digg effect” taking down their servers with a rush of traffic — it raised a total of $45 million in financing from venture investors such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Andreessen Horowitz, all of whom will presumbly write the investment off as a difficult lesson in the vagaries of the social web.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Ed Kohler and Giuseppe Bognanni

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• Code Advisors, the little guy bankers helping little startup guys gets a big cash infusion from JPMorganChase.
• Revision3, an online video network, gets acquired by Discovery Communications for $30 million.
• and LinkedIn buys SlideShare for $119 million.

A few days ago, uber-VC Fred Wilson wrote this great post – Where’s my billion dollar check, I wonder. In that post, this one paragraph is one that stuck with me.

And when you’ve been toiling away month after month, year after year, with no pot of gold in sight, it can be hard to watch that billion dollar deal go down. It’s a punch to the gut. It hurts. I’d love to say to all of you who are feeling that pain that your time will come. But most likely it will not. That’s the way this game is played.

All you got do is play the game. As hard as you can. And that is what the people behind those four news items I listed above did for a long time. Some of them I have known for nearly a decade-and-a-half. Others for only three years. But I can safely say that most of the people behind these companies are genuinely good people, who were in it for the love of the game, and not the money.

David Prager, me and Kevin Rose @ inaugural NewTeeVee Pier Screenings.

Revision 3 was the producer and distributor of the GigaOM Show. They were a tiny company with big ambitions. Our show didn’t last long, but Revision 3 managed to withstand the online video bust and make a solid comeback. During the GigaOM Show days, I got to know David Prager, the understated and less-known third co-founder of Revision 3 (Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson are the other two co-founders.)

There hasn’t been a day since I have known Prager when he hasn’t been sweating blood for his company. Carrying cameras. coming up with show concepts and even putting up with a financial roller coaster, he was resolute in his ambitions for Revision 3. The fact that they are now part of Discovery, a company I deeply admire, is the ultimate victory for their idea.

Like Revision3, SlideShare too is the story of sheer guts and glory. First, they heard the jabs – a YouTube for Powerpoint presentations? Now who would want to share Powerpoint presentations and create a social network around these presentations? The company raised a total of $3 million from a whole bunch on angels and Venrock.

They were unconventional — splitting their operations between India and United States. (Ever want to know the real meaning of toughing it out — try flying to New Delhi in economy class multiple times a year. ) Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle are a couple and apparently it is a no-no in the Valley to fund a couple. And they built a product that people would pay for — a strange idea for some kids.

Rashmi and Jon (who occasionally wrote for GigaOM as a guest blogger) essentially pinched pennies and lived between hope and despair as they built a great little company. They never got the media attention or the credit due to them. And yet, they showed up every day, to fight the good fight anyway. I guess playing for the love of the game does eventually turns into a windfall.

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During his eight years with the company, Girouard helped lead Google’s push to take on Microsoft  in desktop applications and email,  two areas where Microsoft dominated. While Microsoft remains atop the heap, Google was able to parlay its cloud-based infrastructure to win some share and to compete for some high-profile accounts.

Its aggressive subscription pricing on Google Apps and Gmail — not to mention the free versions – forced Microsoft to offer cheaper hosted versions of Office, SharePoint, and Exchange email.

Girouard also spearheaded the Google Appliance push to embed Google search inside customer data centers. Sundar Pichai, SVP of Google Chrome and apps, will take on Girouard’s responsibilities, CRN reported.

Girouard posted news of his career change to his Google+ site Friday night,  the same day Google confirmed a report that it hired Digg founder Kevin Rose. Rose’s new duties were not specified.

For all Google’s effort, the incumbent powers Microsoft Office and Exchange Server still lead the corporate applications and email market.  Last fall, market researcher Gartner estimated that Google Apps for Business represented less than 1 percent of Google’s overall revenue and there is some doubt as to whether the enterprise apps business remains a priority for the company.

Still, market share and revenue may never have been Google’s goal. By offering a lower-cost option to the Office/Exchange tandem, Google forced the market leader to respond, and that may have been the point all along.

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(Context: I’m a 31-year-old CEO of  a tech and creative agency, iStrategyLabs. This year will be my fourth trip to SXSW.)

1. Ask everyone what they’re up to before you pimp what you’re doing. Nobody cares about your crappy startup (even if it’s not crappy). People care about what they’re doing and what their problems are. If you can help them with what they’re doing, or solve their problem, then they’re instantly going to love you.
2. Don’t sell too hard or you’ll just look like a schmuck. Although SXSW is only a few days long, it is both a sprint and a marathon. I’ve done deals with people two or three years after first meeting them at SXSW. Those have been the biggest and best deals of my career, and they didn’t come about because I went to SXSW to sell something.
3. Love first. Sales second. There’s plenty of time to sell after SXSW. But there’s a limited amount of time during the conference to meet lots of people and make them absolutely love you. Focus on getting people to fall in love with you, and everything else will follow.
4. Working a room of 100 amazing people is better than hitting 10 events filled with less-than-awesome people. Party and panel hopping is great. I do a ton of it, but I only leave if the people aren’t awesome. If they are amazing, I stay there as long as it makes sense. Amazing is subjective. You need to figure this out for yourself. For me, amazing people are those who teach me something new. If I’m not learning, I move on.
5. Shticks are valuable social devices. Have at least one. You need something to talk about other than your startup. For example, this year GE hired us to hack one of their appliances so that people have to use Foursquare check-ins to get the beer GE put inside. That’s cool. I can pimp that to everyone, and tell them to go check in to get free beer. They don’t care about “iStrategyLabs’s new Social Machines offering that does blah blah blah.” They want free beer. They’ll tell other people about the cool way I hooked them up with free beer. A few months from now, this will lead to someone hiring me and paying me $200,000. All because they remembered the free beer.
6. Don’t linger. Lingerers are lame. Absolutely never sweat the web-celebs. Even if you see Shira Lazar, Pete Cashmore, Robert Scoble and Kevin Rose hanging out at Six Lounge, don’t get all up in their grill like a high school basket ball fan meeting LeBron James. Talk to people like they’re just as influential as you are and that they’re normal humans. Say hello. Try to make a real connection. And move on — quickly.
7. Forget about balancing work and fun. Eat this festival alive, and come out the other end ready to step up your game. If you’re at SXSW, your work is probably really fun. If you work isn’t fun — then you should be looking for a new job at SXSW.
8. Guys: Don’t be a non-stop hit-on-cute-tech-and-Texas-girls machine. That’s the creepiest thing you could do. It could damage your personal brand and your company, and you might miss an opportunity to connect meaningfully with the opposite sex – cutting off the possibility of a great business outcome or long-term friendship.
9. Gals: Avoid the mechanical bull at the Rebels Honky-Tonk. Seriously. You don’t want to end up tagged on Facebook by colleagues when you’re half (or fully drunk) and potentially exposing yourself. I’ve seen this happen.
10. Geeks of all stripes: Don’t trust anyone who says SXSW sucks. That’s like saying chocolate doesn’t taste good or that sunsets are ugly. It’s just crazy talk. Your SXSW lanyard is your golden ticket to personal and professional nerd heaven. Enjoy it!

Peter Corbett is the CEO of iStrategyLabs, a creative social agency. He tweets at @corbett3000.

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The announcement caps off an epic seven-year-long run, one that proved there was an audience for longer-form content online and also helped build Revision3 into a full-fledged web content network. Expect beer company stock to drop dramatically when the market opens tomorrow.

While the show’s not over quite yet, in memoriam, we reached out to the team at Diggnation to find out what some of their favorite moments were over the course of the show’s run.

Co-host Alex Albrecht said via email that one of his favorite moments was “The first appearance of Jimmy Fallon. Kevin and Jimmy high fiving in front of my face. :(“

Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback’s favorite moment, he said via email, also involved Jimmy Fallon. “When we did an episode at MSNBC with Rachel Maddow, she made cocktails for all of us. She makes a mean drink – and Jimmy Fallon stopped by to say hi too!” (Coincidentally, this is also my favorite moment, because those cocktails sound amazing.)

Via email, the show’s often-abused David Prager (who is a co-founder of Revision3 and Diggnation producer) called out one of his favorite Diggnation moments to date:

When the show was performed at the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles in early January 2009. A thick line of fans waiting to get into the show spanned down Hollywood Boulevard infamous walk of fame and around the corner and kept on going. Tourists walking by excitedly asked what movie was premiering or what headline Hollywood event was taking place and I remember saying to one of ‘em, “Don’t worry about it, it’s just a podcast.”

And for old time’s sake, here’s the very first episode of Diggnation, posted July 1, 2005.

Oh, how they’ve grown.

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