Thursday 3 May 2007

Digg in the illegality ?

The last guest in class spoke briefly about Digg, a website (a 2.0website becoming incontrovertible) enabling to share your favorites pages with everybody.
At the beginning of the story, there is an article digged containing a decoding key to copy any HD movie (this key had been changed since last week :)). In few hours, the article became famous, referenced by more than 16,000 internet users. What made this article n° 1 on Digg, appearing in first on the website.

Immediatly, the AACS LA (the compagny owner of the technology and of the key) required (through a letter do digg) the deleting of the link to the article. And Digg obey, saying through there blog "However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down."

But the community didn't agre. Few minutes after the deleting, the article reappeared, and is deleted again. A hide-and-seek game starts, the names of articles changes, subjects too, but the key is still in them.
Seeing that the party is lost (after hours, the 10 "best" articles containing the key), Kevin Rose founder of Digg lined up with the community and took a very courageous position: "You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."
The title of the message being
"Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" (guess what? it's the famous key, but too late to use it :()

Digg is now running a risk being illegal. The US law about copyright saying that the diffusion of any code or key allowing the bypass of technologic mesures is forbidden.
Hollywood has not respond yet to it.
But how many websites are illegal? mininova.org offering torrents for few years now (after the closing of meganova.org). If Digg closes, another website will emerge, with the same values (sharing not pirating). On Internet, communities can be dissolved and 2 days after they will appear again, stronger (in number and more populare).
I love it :D

Tuesday 1 May 2007

Why choose the correct domain name?

Utube vs Youtube.
Both are specialist of tubes, but no the same ones. And the first companie sues the other one. This complaint is justified by the explosion of the costs generated by the mistakes of the Internet users.
The traffic of the specialist of the tube (real tube :) actually increased from 1,500 guests per month to more than 2millions. The host of the website couldn't cope with this important increase. Such as Utube.com had to pay a lot of money to get proper structure.
2 millions of guest per month!! What a chance for a website. But Utube.com cannot sell tube to persons who want to see the trailler of the next spyderman :(

I'am a French cybertizen!!!

The second round of the french presidential election will take place next sunday but there is already one winner: Me, You,US :The cybermilitant and other bloggers .
In few month, Internet has changed the face of the traditional militant. For a long time, we were passive, spectators of the campaign where the general staff used us as onlookers. But due to the Internet, we became more than an actor, we became real activists.

Even if the blogs didn't have a strong impact on the votes, they gave a participative role to thousands of citizens wanting to speak without the bundaries of the official guidelines and the traditionnal stonewalling of the television studio and radio talk-show.

Mobilized on the blogs or forums, the new militant completes the arguments of the campaign, starts debates, takes part in the buzz. Then, the information goes up to the head of the party where the multimedia responsibles have strategic positions.
We can find these militants on all the formats, even on Second life!

The hardest thing is to evaluate the real value of this army of mouse and screen who made what we call in France "the other campaign". Since few years, citizens gives up the politic what could be seen through very low participation rates in the elections. But investing in the virtual politic is maybe the same than giving up the real one. Maybe it is the limit to the political involvement via the Enter touch?