O’Reilly Digg troubles
p2p news / p2pnet: Open source Pligg, based on Menéame, is a Spanish Digg clone which recreates the user, story, and voting backends behind Digg.
O’Reilly Network editor and blogger Steve Mallett’s iTunesLove.com and LinuxFilter are built on Pligg and because of that, yesterday, "O’Reilly found itself at the center of a controversy on the popular news site, digg.com," says O’Reilly Radar.
Mallett was, "very publicly accused, via a Digg story, of stealing Digg’s CSS pages," it says. "The story was voted up rapidly and made the homepage, acquiring thousands of diggs (thumbs-up) from the Digg community along the way.
"There was only one problem: Steve didn’t steal Digg’s CSS pages."
Pligg copied the Digg CSS files, "so Steve’s sites had them too," continues O’Reilly Radar. "Steve had assumed the open source code didn’t violate copyrights, as we all do, and was surprised to learn otherwise. Things were muddied because Steve had been automatically submitting stories from his other sites to Digg (because a Digg front-page story gets a lot of traffic), which leant credence to the claim of ’spammer’ made by the poster of the ‘Steve’s stealing Digg’s CSS’ post. The main claim of stealing CSS was superficially true, but substantially false."
The tale underscores a classic Web 2.0 problem, says the post, pointing out that BoingBoing, "updates stories as soon as new facts come to hand, even if it means they’ve admitted ‘whoops, that wasn’t true at all!’."
So does p2pnet.
But, "It’s more complex with community sites, because editors don’t make the editorial decision to run a faulty story but nonetheless have to live with its consequences," adds O’Reilly Radar. "And everyone has to deal with the situation when their site has been used to further someone else’s agenda. Digg is still learning how to deal with this, and I look forward to seeing how they tackle it in the future."
Also See:
O’Reilly Radar – Digging The Madness of Crowds, January 9, 2006
