My sympathies lie with Kevin on this. He’s being accused of censorship, a charge that really only ought to be leveled at the government and only when censorship is actually occurring, when all he’s doing is abiding by intellectual property law. The HD-DVD encryption code is a piece of property. Rose couldn’t let Digg become the place where the HD-DVD code got out. Doing so might destroy him and the site he founded and thereby the community that’s rioting against him now. Of course, the Digg community seems to be eating itself alive anyway at this point. For those of us who’ve had problems with the kids over at Digg, this riot is hardly a surprise. In some ways it’s the logical outcome of Web 2.0.

And it’s all going to be moot: Engineers will probably have a new encryption code in a day or so, making the code that has now spread beyond Digg to Slashdot and elsewhere useless. Until it gets hacked and posted at Digg, of course.

submitted by taylorhayward 2 hours 42 minutes ago (via http://taylorhayward.org/digg_…)

A small group of users may be controlling parts of Digg

I just submitted an accurate story to Digg critiquing their promotion system, and how it may be being manipulated by a small group of right-wing users. The story was up to 138 diggs in 4 hours, which would put the article on the front page without question, except, a small group of unknown users has marked the story as “lame” which buried it.

How dare conservatives take advantage of user-generated ranking structures for news like everyone else!

If you’re a liberal who puts the Digg button on your site and encourages your readers to use it, you’re a social-networking revolutionary.

If you’re a conservative who does the same, you are master of “gaming” and “spamming” and “controlling” the system:

Look for an increase in unhinged reactions as more and more conservative bloggers and right-leaning Internet users join Digg and embrace other social bookmarking tools.

See, that’s the wonderful thing about social networking technology. It doesn’t discriminate by political ideology.

Not yet, anyway…

Registered members of the site get to vote on (“digg”) which news stories/blog posts will be featured on the front page. The greater the number of diggs, the higher the placement on the page.

I encourage you to register and participate. One of the things I’ve noticed about the most buzzed-about user-generated sites–not just Digg, but also Slashdot, Metafilter, Fark, Del.Icio.Us, YouTube, etc.–is the dearth of conservative representation.

Why is that? Some lefties think it’s because most of the sites’ most passionate members are techies, and they theorize that techies tend to be more libertarian or liberal than conservative. Is that true? I don’t know.

Other commenters think it’s because most conservative Internet users/blog readers have day jobs/family life away from the computer, while the Kos Kidz and Kompany surf all day on and off the clock. Is that true? I don’t know.

Whatever the reason, moonbat dominance isn’t inevitable. And hey: Diversity is good. These sites should welcome alternative viewpoints. Get on the playing field!

***

Speaking of YouTube (which just hit more than 100 million video dowloads per day), you may have noticed that I embedded the Moonbat Fast edition of Vent on Friday here at mm.com instead of linking at Hot Air as a I usually do. We were curious about whether a political videoblog could compete with the usual fare at YouTube–you know, girls in bikinis, Ask a Ninja segments, car crashes, and so on. The video has garnered 76,000+ views and was the 5th most-watched video on Friday/98th most-watched video of the week–proving there is a market for right-leaning video at YouTube waiting to be tapped.

I’ve created a new group at YouTube for conservatives to share videos, post movies, and keep in touch. Come join us on the right side of YouTube.

***
LGF is getting Diggy With It, too, and Charles Johnson is also including quick links to del.icio.us for his commenters. He writes:

Both of these sites tilt pretty heavily toward the moonbat side of the current political scene, so I thought it might be a good idea to attempt to establish a lizardoid beachhead there.

LGF commenter echoparkdirt notes the partisan dynamic over at Digg:

Oh, by the way, how DIGG works is that articles don’t get a lot of readership until they hit the “Front Page” — so that means within 24 hours, articles need to get a certain amount of DIGGS to get there. That’s why it’s important to DIGG the articles you like. But people can also “BURY” articles, and even if they are popular, if they reach a certain amount of “BURYS” they are pulled from the front page. Several of my articles (mostly with the word Muslim in it) have fallen victim to this fate. It is, you understand, racist to call attention to Global Jihad.

These are the articles that were buried within 30 minutes of hitting the Front Page.

Strangely, many of these links are ones I found thru LGF:
http://digg.com/world_news/Can_There_be_Peace_with_Islam
http://digg.com/politics/Cindy_Sheehan_Fast_Includes_Smoothies_and_Ice_Cream
http://digg.com/offbeat_news/
Man_With_Bomb_Components_and_Copy_of_Koran_Allowed_To_Fly_

So the question is, how to respond to a sinister burial campaign? The only way I can figure out is to respond in kind — and attempt to reach an uneasy balance of power.

Anyway this should be fun.

Go help bolster the forces.

***

Matt at Blackfive is also using Del.icio.us links so their readers can bookmark the blog. He e-mails:

We’ve been featuring the links for a week. My visits have gone up
(but I can’t tell for sure if the Del links have helped). AND I’ve gotten a ton of left wing comments and email which is something that I don’t usually get unless featured in an MSM article.

Thanks for trying to get more conservatives on board with the (somewhat) newest technology.