« September 5, 2006 | Main | September 7, 2006 »
September 6, 2006
A Digg fan takes a close look at the popular news site and finds that "a small 'aristocracy' controls the vast majority of the content that gets on Digg, and it means that every day it gets harder and harder for new users to have any kind of an impact." Even the cult of the amateur has its upper crust.
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine," writes Wired's Lore Sjöberg, "and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it."
The backlash against Facebook's new feed service builds, as some students see it as a violation of their trust and their privacy: "When we join facebook, we automatically give up a little bit of our privacy. To use Facebook has always been 'socially-acceptable stalking.' Now, though, they've just gone too damned far. No one wants their girlfriend or boyfriend knowing when they've commented on a photo, written on a wall, or anything else. No one wants people to see that they've left a group; it could offend someone. No one really wants to see the change in status of someone's love life."
Paul Hartzog sees a rosy future for writers in a world of "social publishing," where "authors create and distribute their work, and readers, individually and collectively, including fans as well as editors and peers, review, comment, rank, and tag, everything." Phil Edwards sees the darker side: "My problem is that I'm not sure about the economics of it. It's not so much that writers won't write if they don't get paid - writers will write, full stop - as that writers won't eat if they don't get paid: some money has to change hands some time. If the kind of development Paul is talking about takes hold, I can imagine a range of more-or-less unintended consequences, all with different overtones but few of them, to this jaundiced eye, particularly desirable."
Posted by nick at September 6, 2006 12:54 AM