Wow. Here's the brief summary; MPAA/RIAA come up with new encryption scheme for the HD-DVD format. Designed to limit piracy from their stand point, designed to limit user choice and control (fair use) from the critics standpoint. Smart internet kid cracks the code, posts information on the interwebs. Some time goes by, someone posts it to digg. Digg removes post and bans user. Word gets out, all hell breaks loose sense Digg is supposed to be a damn-the-man democratic revolution. Turns out, Digg takes ad money from the HD-DVD people. Next thing you know, every single story on Digg contains the code and theres no way to stop it.

The next day, Kevin tries to play clean up.

A PR stunt or a user revolt, either way the implications are interesting. How can you stop the spread of a string of hex that can be expressed in all sorts of ways? Should you?

For anyone who was doubting the problems of the mob-mentality when we launched Netscape with a few editors, does your initial opinion still hold true? While you might believe that the number should be spread to all corners of the internet, at least on Netscape you can still find your news without all the mayhem. Then again, maybe it's the mayhem thats the appeal.

Anyway.. Interesting stuff.

There's been a lot said about the hazards of the "Hive Mind" lately. Jaron Lanier wrote an excellent essay here. Mike Propst touched on it recently in relation to our attempts over at Netscape.

I just wanted to throw my two cents out there on a particular aspect of it, and explain why the hive can be dangerous without some sort of mechanism for followup.



This just isn't true. It's the top result on Page 2 when my name is searched via google. For the non-geeky folks reading this, I'll do my best to explain why this would be such a "horrible" thing to be said.

To digg users, who are notably young and 94% male, this admission would have been evidence of "gaming the system." Gaming is naturally against the spirit of the democratic site, where the better content should win out with more votes. It strikes many of them as unfair to ask people you know to "digg" material that you submitted. In Weblogs, Inc's case, they believe that its an unfair advantage to have colleagues. Oddly, I'm positive everyone of these kids have begged their friends to digg their false accusations, but hey, what's hypocrisy in the face of teenage angst and a cause.

In reality, what was said was in response to the suggestion that Digg has anti-asking-your-friend-tools and we should develop them too. I replied with something funny like "i can assure you that they don't", or "if they do, they don't work very well", or something to that effect. I say this after doing our own research and evaluation, judging the content posted there, and more importantly by simplistic logic. I simply don't think that they have such tools, can't have such tools, and shouldn't have such tools. If they do have these tools, then it's obvious that they suck. Plus, what would it matter to them. Digg wants more people to come to their site. E-mail your friends. Please. From Netscape's perspective, I think it's a losing battle. I'd rather spend our resources on finding ways to innovate within the space. And yeah, e-mail the hell out of your friends. Spread the word.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I was misquoted as saying something that I didn't, and now it's attached to my name on google for ever and ever.

Digg.com takes pride in their we-have-no-editors approach. That's their whole jam. That's their cause that they sell to the young teenage male. Ask someone like Ryan Block, the managing editor at Engadget.com, about how he has to defend himself and his organization what seems like once a month. Without linking to any of that nonsense, the kids over there pretty much look for any reason to attack him. He's constantly taken out of context or reported as doing something that is either completely false or not entirely accurate. The problem is, there's no way to address it. It gets posted, it gets indexed, and there's no one to call and pester for its removal or correction. The only responses are buried deep in user comments and probably never seen nor read.

That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't a large number of people who trust digg. There are even more people who trust the Google Results that index Digg. Like a growing number of employers.

Imagine I was misquoted as saying something worse, maybe something that could actually get me in trouble. Maybe it's time for a promotion, or theres a new boss to report to, or I seek employment with another company, or whatever other scenario you can think of. In the heat of all the anti-netscape sentiment, some 14 year old brat posts a misquote on a "news" site, and now there's zero method for rebuttal. Awesome... An organized, democratic method for slander controlled by the Hive Mind where liability is skewed in the name of social news and lack of editor accountability.

At Netscape, we've tried to develop mechanisms for users to report stories as inaccurate. An on-duty "anchor" (there's someone online 24 hours, 7 days a week) can research the story and alert users to the dispute. Often, it doesn't need to be removed, it simply needs a notice posted addressing the concern for other users to see. It's simple, it's clean. It's still democratic and user's still have a voice. There's just a basic system of checks to keep things in balance. Seems resonable (and proven) enough to me.

There's a lot of issues surrounding the Hive Mind. Maybe this post can help serve as a plain vanilla example of a basic aspect of it. This particular case is small, it's silly, it doesn't even matter -- but it's a simple demonstration of how the unrestricted hive can't be trusted. It's kind of like the Hitchhikers Guide. It's entertaining but it's inaccuracy has potentially dangerous consequences if you put to much trust into it.

While the vast majority of the feedback has been extremely positive (it's easily 100:1 on postive:negative), we of course get a ton of e-mail from the ever-so-great "digg army". I thought I'd go ahead and share one of these e-mails and the response I sent back. Consider this an open reply to all the "you ripped off digg" e-mails we've gotten in the past, and will certainly continue to get for at least another week or so... ;)

E-mail (sent with "Compliments to the Team" as the subject line)

Great job on the digg copy. Did you hire some people from yigg.de? Did your design team sit around thinking up fresh new ideas or were you hoping that something like digg would come around so you could just copy? Nice job. A for unoriginality.

Response:

Hey there,

Thanks for the compliments.

When we set out to build the new Netscape, we set out to build a "people powered portal". With that, we looked at all the services online that we were fans of. Newsvine, delicious, digg, youtube, various social networks, etc.

We then discussed the pro's/con's of each and the best way to combine different elements to meet our end vision. We added in professional journalists to alleviate the problems of the "hive mindset." Our demographic being completely opposite of digg, it's a way for us to increase the trust level with folks who are used to more traditional outlets. We'll be adding in a slew of new functionality to continue down this path in the upcoming weeks/months/years.

As far as social news sites go, Digg has a very clean concept of voting and ranking. Our ranking structure is a bit different (i.e., more portal), but the general concept is founded in the same principles. This decision allowed us to focus our energies on other portions of the site. (the "Why invent the wheel?" concept)

Play around on the site, and if you have any suggestions on things we can improve, drop us a line. It's not intended to be a "digg killer" or anything else that the media outlets try to pitch it as. We all still check digg daily (as well as slashdot), and will certainly continue to do so.

Best,

Alex Rudloff
Netscape.com Developer (and fellow fan of digg)

So yeah, the thing I haven't been able to talk about the last 3 or 4 months? The reason I've lost touch with friends and family? I'm the lead developer of the new Netscape.com.

Yesterday, as you probably read about in the New York Times, Techcrunch, Digg, Slashdot, or other major media outlet, we launched the newest generation of the Netscape brand. It's a social news site blending together professional journalism and user submitted content. It's a beta and certainly not without its flaws, but we think it's a hell of an initial "release."

On the Experience...

It's been a hell of a ride. Again, we wrote this thing in 3 or 4 months from scratch. We kept nothing of the existing netscape.com code base. We modeled the framework after the Blogsmith framework (which I worked on with Gavin Hall, the dev lead on Blogsmith and Weblogs, Inc., and also my long standing business partner), so we kinda had a decent idea of scalability and performance. (Blogsmith runs Engadget and the rest of Weblogs, Inc, and most recently, TMZ.)

The Netscape tech team is absolutely top notch. Brian Alvey is our chief architect and a super hero. Trey, Tom, Craig, Andy, and MIke Propst are just amazing at what they do. Combine that with the incrediable journalists we have as anchors and the fact that Calacanis can sell a feather to a pimp -- it's bound to be entertaining. The experience was (is) even more enjoyable simply because we all get along so well. We're kind of like a techie street gang.

On Launch...

Seriously.. Who showed Jason how to use iChat?! Now I have a giant, upset Jason staring at me when things aren't working right. Talk about pressure. ;) It's all good though, while some prefer email and IM, I guess I'm just a little more traditional with the face-to-face. Having the video going made it really easy to communicate with the folks up at 75 rock. God bless the internet.

It wasn't a perfect launch, we had amazing amounts of traffic and media coming in right from the very first minute, but we've learned a lot and it'll make us a better site going forward. Beta is about exposing weaknesses and fixing them, and I think we accomplished that (and will continue to do so).

Mad props go out to the hosting staff at AOL -- Matt Dunbar, who has stayed up with us on the damn-near-all-nighters, Adam Leff who we paged out of bed last night, Joe Gibbs, Kevin Pettit, Jacob and everyone else who puts up with our annoying help-us phone calls -- the list could take up an entire blog post. Much love.

On Digg...

I'll just take it head on -- of course we modeled ourselves after digg. It's an iteration, and a huge compliment to Digg itself. We're validating social news on a much more mainstream level. Are we a "digg killer," uh, no. Was digg a slashdot killer? I still check both. It's not a zero sum kinda thing. I pay for slashdot, and I would gladly pay for digg. I don't need to pay for Netscape, cause well, we have enough ad's to cover it........ (ahem) yeeaaah...

Digg wasn't the first site in the social news space by a long shot. Hell, I wrote a half assed attempt at it six years ago. My version failed, just like most of the others before Digg. Digg succeeded because Kevin Rose and his team did a hell of a job.

I know there's a lot of uproar from the Digg army about how close our site looks to Digg. Take out the vote badge, and would that still be the case? What then? We use the color yellow? This is web2.0 -- we all use the color yellow. We settled on the badge after playing around with a handful of other metaphors. Props to newsvine by the way, I love that damn vote thing. The fact is, Digg got it right. Why would we not do something that we thought was the best of the bunch? We could invent something else I'm sure, but seriously -- 3 months. That was our schedule. There's bigger fish to fry.

On Anchors...

Seriously. How cool is the idea of taking professional journalists, and throwing them into the mix of a social driven site? Users suggest the news, vote on the news, and the news gets covered by the people and by the folks who are paid to research things. If you can't see the power in that, then well, your just a hater ;) C.K. and the gang are going to be the jam.

Speaking of Hate...

Thanks for the QA Valleywag. Also, lots of people freaking out about the frame navigator -- it's going to be a preference that users can turn off forever and ever, we promise. The best possible way to measure response to it is to throw it out there. Lots of people like it (if your in firefox, use j to move forward, k to move backwards, v to vote, etc... its neat), lots of people don't. Sounds like the perfect thing to make a preference out of.

As far as the ads go.. Our hands are kinda tied. We promise to clearly mark anything thats an ad as an ad. We promise to get rid of the really horrible ones as soon as we can. Hopefully, we'll be able to come up with ad placement that makes everyone happy. We've been in beta for exactly 24 hours now.

On Features...

I'm just now allowed to blog about this thing, god knows I'm probably not supposed to blab away about upcoming features. I can tell you though, we have some really neat things coming down the pipe that will help seperate netscape from the "digg clone" category. Again, or goal isn't to be another digg. It's to be a social news site. That's it. Look for really neat tie in's to the anchor stuff. Also, I'm a huge fan of tagging and the like, so, hopefully we'll be able to get us-some-of-that (more than we have). And obviously, RSS/JSS on damn near everything. Oh, and whatever Digg v3.0 does, cause, all the haters bring in lots of traffic..... ;)

On Feedback...

We're listening. Leave a comment on someones blog, or use the feedback link on the new netscape site itself (sign in, its in your user info box, top right).

On Blah...

I'm officially pooped. Looking forward to decent sleep tonight and maybe a full meal in the morning. My appetite is finally starting to come back now that the caffiene is fading off.. w00t.

There's really nothing DC related here, it's just a clever way to note that I'm back in town for a few days before turning around and heading to New York. I got my knee pads packed and an extra bottle of ketchup, Code Jam 6 here I come.

Links

• Add this to my Amazon Wish list - Here's the kicker though.. With Kathryn and I riding shotgun, it doesn't look like I can attach Gavin's silly little side car very easily.
• Best entrepreneurs wear jeans - See, I told you my fancy boy jeans were an investment. Too bad I work from home, and don't have to wear pants. (ahem)
  
• Digg is a marketing beast - 37 Signal's getting real. A real digg on.
• A cross between tetris and bingo?! - I no longer fear growing old.

Vander Walhas an interesting post that's in reponse to another interesting post byMatt McAlister. Both seem to suggest popularity scales may be overrated.Many websites rank items via some sort of popularity. Digg.com uses voting mechanisms, everyone seems tohave some sort of "Tag Cloud" going, some measure clicks or email forwards orpage views. The thought is, the more popular an item on the web, the higherquality of that item.

But what about niche topics? Is coverage on these sites being "normalized", asMcAlister writes? On the face of it, popularity is relative to everything else.If I'm really into pet rocks, a really popular pet rock page isn't going tobe popular in relation to, say, Chinese kids singing like a boyband. If I'm searching out specific information within a somewhat obscuretopic, ranking things by popularity would only seem to make it harder tofind.

Vander Wal writes that popularity gets in the way of information seeking.Maybe, but it would seem that keywords intermixed with popularity would helpmake results more relevant naturally. After all, Google seems to handle mysearch for "petrocks" just fine, and they rank largely on popularity (in fact, thats kindatheir whole gig ;). On the other hand, digg.com might not provide the bestmeans for searching out a topic, but is it supposed to? Seems to me digg is asite that allows you to see the most popular information floating around rightthen and there. Sure, it's collecting meta-data, but, I mean, does digg evenhave categories or tags? It's category is "Technology", and it's tag is"popular." The rest of the meta-data is decent, but suffers from occasional lowquality (as opposed to tags, which would balance themselves out if properlyimplemented).

Still, there's plenty of information that I'm sure is thrown to the waysidebecause it's not showing up on the popularity radar. Is there a way to judgeit's content in a way other than popularity? Sure, subjectively by an editorialteam, but that's simply infeasible on a large scale as it would require expertsin a ton of different catagories. Wikipedia meets dmoz maybe? I donno.

Anyway, I think proper search mechanisms in tandem with popularity measurementis a solid approach. Either without the other doesn't quite cut it in terms ofinformation (re)location.

Rocks! Blogs! bloggingohio.com

About six months ago, I told Kathryn I'd go visit Ohio for awhile if she could find access to broadband internet. She was just now able to do so, and now there's bloggingohio.com. Coincidence? Or did Ohio just now get internet? ;)

Either way, it's great to see Weblogs, Inc. experiment with localized blogs. I hear the CMS under the hood over there is pretty badass.... ;)

Links

• Digg Corrupted
• Branch: Sustainable Design For Living
• How to avoid office politics

How fitting. The first comment posted to this brand spanking new blog of mine is "Hey Alex! Bring back bored.cc!" Every couple months I get an email or an IM, or now a blog comment, with that same request. It's actually pretty cool, and I totally enjoy hearing from the bored.cc crowd.

I'd love to bring back bored.cc. Starting from scratch, I could make it such a better site. Seeing things like digg.com come along and basically do the same thing in a cleaner way made me understand some of the usability issues we never got past (while making me a tad jealous in the process.. though, I mean, Kevin Rose is the man, so... it's cool.)

For those who never had the chance to play around with bored.cc, it was basically a generic digg (not just tech) but was based around this whack ass RPG metaphor instead of votes (almost in a joking fashion, but it worked).

Users would submit stories, post comments, post jokes, create polls, participate in web cam rankings, etc. etc. All the while, they'd earn experience points for their participation. Naturally, they'd move up levels every so many points. The higher the level, the more moderation power the user had over the site -- approving/rejecting stories (more like slashdot in this fashion, which is what it was modeled after), etc. The entire concept was built around the idea that I, as the admin, would never ever have to do anything. It should run itself in this weird sort of communal way.

It ran for the majority of my college career untouched (literally, coded and rarely touched again, for years... not good practice, but an interesting experiment), slowly growing in users. Never advertised and only based on word of mouth and search engine traffic, we went down with about 1000 users (at one point we had more, but lots of them were spam/crap..so.. doesn't count ;). Traffic wasn't great, but it would have been nice to throw adsense on it ;)

At the end of it all, I guess I was looking for post-college jobs and knew if someone googled me, they might not get the most flattering returns. That was probably what drove me to shut it down. I should have just removed my name from it and let it run.

Anyway, stay tuned, who knows ;)