CogBlog

It's been interesting to see some of the response to last night's Digg takeover. Quite a few people have said it is an example of mob rule, deplorable, evidence that Digg is not really a "community", and so on.

The interesting part of all this to me is that:

1. It is a lesson in damage control gone awry. Clearly if your entire rights management scheme relies on keeping one bit of information under lock and key, you'll have a very difficult time once that bit of information is released in the wild. And, if your plan is to brand anyone who later passes that bit along a criminal, you'll be again putting yourself in a very bad position, at least from a public relations standpoint. And by doing so, you may just accomplish exactly the opposite of what you intended through your attempts at enforcement.
   
   
2. I think it is interesting that Kevin Rose titled his post with the key. Obviously that is a risky choice, but also in fact the only thing that could have short-circuited the massive wave of copy-cat postings that were rising up the digg ladder--short of just taking the site down. Another example of a kind of rule of opposites of online damage control : heavy handedness fed the fire, capitulation snuffed it out.
   

I'm not saying that I think what happened on digg was right (I'm not exactly sure it falls into the realm of right and wrong).

But, it is an example of something that is particularly despised among programmers, developers, and security types online (a big part of the digg audience), and that is an attempt by a perceived powerful group to protect an inherently flawed system through intimidation, rather than through an improved system. It is analogous to the scenario where a company like Microsoft responds with a threatened lawsuit when a security expert (aka hacker) releases a discovered bug in their code. Most smart businesses (including Microsoft) have figured this out by now, and instead treat it as an opportunity to improve their product and methods.

I think that sentiment is a big part of what fueled the Digg takeover.

Kevin Rose threw his lot in with the diggers themselves last night with this response.

A very interesting lesson was delivered tonight about who actually owns a social media space. Like a few million other people I've been known to get sucked into one story after another on Digg.com. Those stories are like crack for the curious.

Earlier today a story popped up on Digg about a post on blogger that had been removed because of a complaint from the AACSLA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, LLC). The AACS is an industry group set up to enforce copyright protection for the AACS digital rights management system. This digital rights management system is intended to prevent the illegal copying of content on protected DVDs.

The problem is that someone cracked this protection, and then subsequently released the key, composed of an alphanumeric string. Since then, this group has been sending letters to web publishers warning them to remove any postings that contain this key. They warn that publishing this string of numbers and letters is in fact a violation of the digital millennium copyright act.

Well, the funny part about one of these letters is that it actually contained the printed key, inside the URL of one of the pages in question. Now, the story about this letter on chillingeffects.org started making it's way up on Digg.com. But, was then suddenly removed by Digg administrators. What's even funnier is that it was not pulled down before Google indexed the page, and so you can still see the Digg article lead in here in Google's cache

The post that really set things off was this page, that displays the number. It received over 15,000 diggs (votes from members of the digg community that will propel a story towards the number one position on the first page of Digg.com) but then was removed by Digg admins.

Now, this was soon noticed by the community, many of whom were outraged that Digg was taking it upon themselves to censor content that the community clearly felt was of great interest..

Digg administrators also began banning accounts of people who had also published stories containing the string, and subsequently had them dugg up to Digg's top pages.

So, guess what happened next? Every new article that diggers began digging up to the top pages somehow contained the very same encryption key! Posts titled "Can you guess the number I'm thinking of?" would lead to images containing the key. Soon, EVERY STORY on the front page of Digg, was related to this HD-DVD key. As I write this, every story is still related to this.

Now, to realize how big that is, you need to understand that reaching the front page of Digg.com can result in a massive crush of traffic. The phenomenon known as the Digg effect is when a story reaches the front page, only to have the site's server become completely unreachable--crushed under the massive load of traffic directed by Digg.

But, it raises really interesting questions about social media, the people and organizations who run these sites, and what their role is in managing the content published there. Clearly Digg users feel that the Digg homepage is more their property than the property of Kevin Rose (founder of Digg). And, by trying to prevent the distribution of this one bit of information, they have inadvertently sealed their own fate--causing such a tremendous explosion of interest that it really has no hope of containment.

It is a fascinating story. And, no matter how you feel about DRM, you gotta love the way a community can respond like this to a perceived offense. That was a serious social media smackdown!

This was my fourth year as an official blogger for ad:tech San Francisco. Thank you to Steve and Tig at Adrants and MarketingVox for the invite.

Ad:tech is the world largest digital marketing conference, with a full suite of sessions and a very large exhibit hall. I've added my posts from this year to my personal adtech blog. All of these originally appeared (and still appear) on adtechblog.com.