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Posts Tagged ‘digg’

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Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts Album is About MUCH More Than Music.

Posted on 3 March, 2008 at 12:47pm with 3 comments

Nine Inch Nails Ghosts

If you have been reading this blog for even a moderate length of time, you are most likely aware of the unusually high amount of Nine Inch Nails articles on this site (seen here and here to name a few). Considering the general theme of this blog, I could see how this could be seen as strange to many. Still, I tend to write a lot about how digital media (which design-technology intersects with) is changing not only mainstream media, but the society which consumes it – which in turn impacts how we do our work. For the past two years, Nine Inch Nails has really been on the frontlines of pushing media away from the consolidated, copyright-heavy, corporate-run model to a distributed, grassroots, artist-run model.

Last night, Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, an independently-produced album that is available for download for the price of $5. There are 36 songs in this album, so that $5 looks even more reasonable than ever. For those of you into the tangible, CDs can be purchased as well. Additionally, 9 songs are available completely for free – no questions asked. While this is distribution model is new, it is not new – we have seen it with In Rainbows and Niggy Tardust, each with their own little tweaks on it. However, make no mistake, Ghosts is unlike any other album distribution we have seen.
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Social News an Upgrade From an Old-News-Only World

Posted on 5 June, 2007 at 2:17pm with 3 comments

A while back, I read a very interesting article debating the validity of social news sites. There is no denying that the old media machine is beginning to sputter – most notably newspapers. New media has begun to pull visitors away from traditional news outlets with free access to news, less advertising (sometimes) and features unique to the internet such as voting, discussing and recommending. Getting news on the internet is not, well, news at all, however social news is starting to catch on. By catching on, I do not mean our generation, we have been well aware of it for some time – I mean that the larger mainstream is slowly starting to hear whispers of such an idea. The interesting thing is that many people are trying to pit traditional news against social news – as if “there can be only one”. Rather, social news is a great addition to the genre of news which will only improve the public’s access to information.
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Shame on you Digg. Good for you Digg.

Posted on 3 May, 2007 at 12:48am with 5 comments

” alt=”Digg Logo” />
Image courtesy of urlyart.

As many of you most likely know by now, a
series of numbers used to crack HD-DVD have been spreading like wildfire on the internet. As to be expected, articles pertaining to this subject (and the number) showed up all over the place on Digg. All of the sudden, those dugg articles started disappearing off of the Digg site – no doubt from heavy pressure from people affiliated with the HD DVD business. It became suddenly clear why the pressure in this particular case seemed to work when an article pointed out that Digg took a HD DVD sponsorship. As one could expect, the Digg community was furious.
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A Better Web is Coming – Big Business Or Not

Posted on 22 March, 2007 at 4:55pm with 4 comments

I read a very interesting article, Why the Semantic Web Will Fail, about one person’s thoughts on why the web will never reach its full potential due to the greed and short-sidedness of big business. The author makes some very good points in the article and it is quite compelling to read.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.

We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another’s property if it weren’t nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.

And they’re all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies – competing entities choreographing their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?

I think the author is right about one thing – big business is not a big fan of an open, sharing web and will fight it tooth and nail in the name of profit. My feeling however is that business really does not have a choice in the matter. The web is built on a very open, uncontrollable model – opening up infinite possibilities for individuals, competitors and or startups to ruin them in a heartbeat. The web is moving towards a more open model, like it or not. We do not rely on big business, big business relies on us. If corporations do not want to work in that model, all it takes is $15 for a domain name, $100 a month for hosting and word of mouth for some David to take down Goliath.
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Daily Digg: Will Digg Get Flanked?

Posted on 15 December, 2006 at 11:00am with 4 comments

Fitting that the Daily Digg’s subject would be, well, Digg. There has been quite a bit of controversy over some of Digg’s methods of chosing top stories – this is another well-written description of the problems. In a nutshell, the top of the Digg food-chain essentially controls what gets to the front page – that is most likely why the same sites and the same subjects (Wii articles 24/7) are on the front page. This is obviously far from the Democratic approach that Digg boasts and smaller, less-known sites that do not have the right “friends” have a snowball’s chance in hell to make it to the front page. Sadly, the very strength of social news is completely lost in this model.

Delicious seems to be the clear next-in-line to dethrone Digg if things continue as is and people become fed up with the status-quo. Reddit is another challenger, but its traffic is significantly lower and the ability to down-vote storied opens up the door for rampant gaming – something which seems to be fairly common as discussed on Reddit.

Social media/news was supposed to be the solution to the top-down information approach of traditional media. Sadly, the “new media” seems to be taking quite a few lessons from the old school.

read more | digg story

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