Digg Revolt Reignites Debate
301232
Last week's user revolt forces the editors at Digg.com to question whether paid contributors are an essential ingredient for success in social media. In Monkey Bites.
371261
They&#8217;re an opinion piece from the Marc and Angel Blog which compares Yahoo &#038; Google and appears to be making it to the Digg homepage quite shortly. Google handles all of my daily web searching, email, chat, RSS feeds, blog monetization, etc. In my opinion, it blows Yahoo (and most other Internet companies) clear out of [...]
753857
Comment is free: George Monbiot: The push for participatory democracy has the disturbing whiff of an Astroturf campaign - a fake grassroots movement.
28152
Todd Malicoat has jotted down his thoughts on why Digg is the new Google and why Digg is attracting the &#8216;geek mindshare&#8217; that Google did so well pre-2001, when it went beyond grassroots marketing and was slingshot by the great Yahoo! partnership which won over the commonfolk. * They just need an index - Y and [...]
205612
Today on Digg.com, one of the top stories is a domain valuation tool run by DNScoop which valued YouTube at $969 Million and Digg.com at $106 Million.  Seems they are pretty close with YouTube, and Digg could be valued a bit more. I clicked over to their site and it&#8217;s down (the Digg Effect) but [...]
105888
Also: E-voting a 'threat' to UK democracy. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
460513
InfoWorld - The battle between advertisers and online search networks over the pervasiveness of click-fraud continues to grow more heated with researchers claiming rapid growth of automated ad impressions and outside observers noting an overall lack of transparency in the space.
514920
Company weighs idea after thousands of users vote for it online.
248717
MacCentral - A handful of Web sites, including the site for the popular open source bulletin board project phpBB, have been compromised this week by a group apparently trying to make a political point.
585276
Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
348939
Just tried to log into Digg and received this response:  Upgrade in Process. New features are minutes away&#8230; Can&#8217;t wait to see what the new features are :)
647033
There's a fascinating debate today going on about Scoble and his Facebook data. Here's the story so far. Plaxo, on behalf of Scoble, ran a screen scraper on his Facebook account to download information about at least some of his Facebook friends. Facebook detected the scraper and turned off his account, with an email explaining that he had violated their terms of service. The debate: Who is right -- Scoble or Facebook? While there are certainly arguments that Facebook has some rightness, most of it, imho, is with Scoble. Sure, some of the data may "belong" to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn't belong to anyone, it's data about them, and many organizations have this data. Are bloggers really saying that organizations have more rights than people? Isn't blogging all about a level playing field? My bank knows my birthday and my email address. Why shouldn't Scoble? (Maybe he shouldn't.) Scoble called a few minutes ago. I asked what the consensus was. He said it was about 70 percent in his favor, 30 percent in Facebook's. I think we can win over the 30 percent by saying that there should be a system whereby people can decide how much information they want to share with Scoble, or people like Scoble, or me, or people like me, or BofA or the DEA, KGB or CIA. Further, that system is not Facebook, unless they change.  Now, I think there's a pretty good chance that Facebook will change and give Scoble his data and turn his account back on. I think Facebook wants to give us access to our data, but if they just turned the feature on, there would be a shitstorm, kind of like the one that's raging right now. Except this time Facebook has defenders, which they must find refreshing, because every time there's been a shitstorm around Facebook they've always been seen as 100 percent evil by most people. (Not by me, btw.) Maybe they're getting smart there over at Facebook. Maybe they will relent, kind of admit they were wrong, and secretly be happy that they got to open their network up some more.  However, if Facebook doesn't open up and allow people a system to say who can access what information, we still have to create that system somehow. Google could have done it, but they didn't. Same with Yahoo or Microsoft. These companies don't want to empower the users, but if they studied history, they'd see that the evolution of computers always comes in fits and starts. A period when the technology is new and people are snowed by the companies and let them have full control. Gradually people understand what's going on, and figure out they're being screwed but they accept it. And then explosively the whole thing disintegrates in a new layer of technology.  It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could.  In other words, Apple and Microsoft could have invented the web instead of TBL. DEC and Data General could have invented the personal computer instead of Apple and Microsoft (I know this is a simplification, there were lots of individuals and small companies that did it.) And IBM could have invented the minicomputer instead of DEC and Data General. And btw, the NY Times and CNN could have invented blogging and RSS.  So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.
506675
Assignment Zero looks at "crowdsourced" media sites, which love to equate social editing with democracy. It's as raucous, messy and enthralling as the electoral process, and for proof look no further than the much-debated DVD hack posted at Digg.com.
590278
Here's the new Reddit for Scripting News... http://reddit.com/r/scripting/  Please, if you're a regular reader of this site, bookmark it, and when you want to contribute a link to the community, add it there. Do the normal thing you do with Reddit or Digg, move articles up or down, according to your opinion of how relevant they are to the community defined by this weblog.  Warning: I will moderate, heavily if necessary, to keep it from being abusive or overly immature. Sorry for having to post the caveat, but you know how it goes.
347776
The blogosphere erupted with arguments questioning global warming after an error was found in the annual estimate of the average temperature in the United States.
75500
Muhammad Saleem, the new addition to the Pronet Advertising blog, today made a post exposing how the owner of a site named BringPopcorn.com tried to pay multiple Top 10 Diggers $500 to Digg his site and have it appear on the Digg homepage. Hello, I need a favor. I run a website bringpopcorn.com. Would you get my website [...]
90995
Also: Mysterious stone slab bears ancient writing. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.