Have you seen digg has released a cool little widget? I really like it, but I think they might have pinched the idea from somewhere else. Still, it’s a bit more customisable than last.fm’s effort, and I’m all for customising! I’m really liking Daniel Burka’s work lately; he’s done some great work in the past, (see digg, pownce) and no doubt we’ll see some more of his work really soon as digg undergoes some hinted big feature additions.
Archive for the 'digg' Category
aka “Remember, remember, the First of Mayvember, gunpowder, treason and 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0″
I’m not sure if any of you loyal readers follow this kind of internet dramabomb, but today digg.com just got slaughtered by it’s own dedicated fanbase. Basically, what happened is that a user posted a 16 digit hexadecimal key, which when used (on linux, and in the right bit of software) can crack the encryption on a HD-DVD.
Digg admins got to this initial post when it reached around 1500 diggs, and it was deleted. No big deal right? I mean, it’s kind of interesting, but decryption cracks for HD-DVD have been out for a while now, and who out of the hundreds of thousands of people who visit digg use linux, and can acutally make use of this? Not many, I’d wager. Digg has lawyers, and the lawyers would have surely seen that posting and said to the digg lads “uh, you’d better get rid of that before you get served with a takedown notice from the HD-DVD camp.” So, down it goes. What happened next though, was almost completely unexpected.
The story was resubmitted, and in the space of a few hours rocketed to over 15,000 diggs! This was even quicker than the iPhone at the peak of it’s popularity! This submission surely broke a few records for speed and popularity within digg. What happened next? Poof! Admins strike again! Submission gone!
Now the digg community starts to get pissed. Comments start appearing in threads, spamming the key and the tale of the deleted stories. Jay Adelson posts on the digg blog about the issue, stating “…Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law…” This is when the shit really hits the fan.
Hundreds of stories, and thousands of comments start to invade every facet of digg, all posting the key. The front page, typically a diverse mix of all kinds of news, has 3 pages solid of nothing but key-related stories, each reaching thousands of diggs. Comments start dissappearing, and fearing further censorship, this makes people even angrier (this is later attributed to the digg servers going wobbly because of the immense pounding they were taking). This carried on for the rest of the day until finally, Kevin Rose, founder and frontman of digg, makes a post on the digg blog stating that diggers have made their intentions clear, and they’re listening.
“But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”
Things start to subside, and the story and comment spam begin to lessen. Within 12 hours of Kevin’s post, things are more or less back to normal at digg, with the exception of a few stories dealing with the aftermath (which I suppose this very post is), and what this all means.
The story, less than a day old, has made massive waves in the online community, particularly in the (I loathe to call it this) web2.0 community. The story makes slashdot, boingboing, gizmodo, the consumerist, cnet.com and a whole bunch of other blogs. Most notably, this story swept right out of the little navel-gazing bubble that most internet-drama resides in, and was covered at BBC news and Forbes as well.
So what does this all mean?
Basically, it means that the people who participate in these user-driven sites cannot abide censorship of information within a system like this. Digg, which has always professed to be a ‘by the people, for the people’; a truly democratic site, threw away this principle at the risk of being in legal trouble. They felt the backlash. The people will not be silenced. Information (in this case, a hex key), cannot be contained, or repressed, or censored on the internet if the people truly wish it to be so.
Personally, I can’t wait for the next diggnation; it’s going to be a cracker.