May 2 2007
Digg, Censorship and User Created Content
Well yes I am writing about what everyone else is writing about. The recent takeover of the social news site DIGG buy all its users. What is a social news site you ask. Well simply one, where anyone can submit a story from the web that they consider interesting. Then others who visit the site if they like the story can give it a vote – or digg. The stories with the most votes go to the top of the homepage.
So what was the problem. Well someone out there – a very clever person by the way. Has already managed to crack the DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection on High Definition DVD’s. Yes the DRM that they said was unbreakable. The Hexadecimal key, was then pushed up as a story to the top of the page. The Digg owners tried to take the story down, but the USERS of the site have more power and continued to Digg and Post the story until Kevin Rose backed down and said he would not censor the story anymore especially as it is something that is against DRM -which most agree is an arcane way to try and control digital rights. In fact the owners were aunable to censor to keep up with the users, and so REALLY HAD TO BACK DOWN. 50,000 diggs in a few hours is impossible to stop. So will the owner of DIGG lose 60 Million overnight?
And yes their is now a song on Youtube? So what does this mean. And how I suppose you ask does this affect education. Well beyond anything it shows that the power of users, and their ability to act together for a cause that is almost agreed virtually. Secondly how quickly a piece of information now spreads, so that within hours millions of people can be activated and informed and pro-active. Surely those ideas need to be discussed with students and realised. If they are what could be achieved….more to follow….
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