Traditionally, I’ve thought of services like Boing Boing, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Slashdot mainly as mechanisms to discover breaking news and trends. They perform this task well, and as a result, many people check such sites nearly every day. As these services have gained critical mass, though, they’ve taken on a new function: in addition to simply highlighting newsworthy stories, at times they actually help to shape the news itself.
It starts with traffic. Wikipedia has entries for “the Digg effect” and “the Slashdot effect.” Both refer to what happens when either service posts a link on their front page to another web site; the huge numbers of users who then click through in an extremely short amount of time often cause the web server hosting the target link to shut down due either to server overload or to account bandwidth restrictions.
Clearly, a post’s tone, style, and conclusion can have a tremendous impact on the subject. However, an intensely negative post on an unread blog probably won’t have much impact. But almost any story on the front page of Delicious, Fark, or Slashdot will be read by a huge number of people. As a result, these sites have sufficient influence that product launches, reputations, and meaningful sums of money have been made and lost as a direct result of their links, posts, and content. Furthermore, popular posts tend to become even more popular as time passes because people often see stories that are already highly ranked, but miss others that are buried behind the first few pages.
A few examples:
- The Tale of The Abusive Internet Store. Thomas Hawk, who maintains a popular blog on digital media, takes first prize for his depressing experience with PriceRitePhoto, a questionable internet store (read the story–it’s sad). Today, 6 days after Thomas posted his story to digg, more than 7200 people have “dugg” the article, meaning that they found it worthwhile and thought it was merited attention from others (for each person who dugg the article, there are probably an additional 10-20 “lurkers” who visited Thomas’s link but didn’t choose to “digg” the story). In addition, diggers have contributed more than 1000 comments. Thomas’s blog post is now the number two result for anyone searching for “PriceRitePhoto” on Google. As a result, just two days after the story was originally posted, Thomas got a letter of apology from the offending store’s CEO. It’s unclear if Thomas would have received such a letter had his original post gone unnoticed; regardless, my guess is that PriceRitePhoto’s holiday sales will take a beating.
- Sony’s DRM SNAFU. In a dreadfully misguided attempt to control music theft, Sony included a piece of destructive software known as a “rootkit” with a number of music CDs they sold. On November 9, the Electronic Frontier Foundation posted an article listing infected CDs; within a few weeks, almost 2000 people “dugg” that article. On November 18, Sony posted an official apology. I, along with thousands of others, first learned about the Sony rootkit after seeing a post about it on delicious’s popular links page. How much has the bad publicity cost Sony?
- BellSouth an Free WiFi (a work in progress). Last Saturday’s Washington Post had an article describing how BellSouth “withdrew an offer to donate one of [their] damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters” because New Orleans officials decided to launch free WiFi to stimulate economic activity. This story appeared on Digg less than 24 hours ago; already, 1700 people have dugg it, leaving more than 125 comments. So far, I’m not aware of any response from BellSouth. But I bet they will have one, and soon.
- The Grateful Dead’s Music Crackdown. For years, fans have been able to freely download and trade Grateful Dead music. Recently (roughly 11/22), certain surviving members of GD decided to reverse that decision and take down more than 1000 soundboard recordings from a popular internet archive site. Boing Boing covered the story as it developed (here, here, and here). The fan response was so virulent that GD reversed its decision within days (though there is an ongoing debate as to the band’s “true intent”). Without BoingBoing’s coverage, would the band have changed its tune as quickly?
A few obvious comments: first, it’s hard to say definitively that any single web site was completely responsible for any of the actions taken by PriceRitePhoto, Sony, or the Grateful Dead. Second, one could argue that eventually, with sufficient pressure, these groups would have done the “right thing” as other forms of media provided coverage and commentary. Third, these systems, like all forms of media, are subject to gaming and, as such, discretion should be applied.
All that said, I think that the emerging internet services mentioned above have fundamentally changed the landscape and altered the balance of power in favor of the individual. Anyone, anywhere can now write a blog about any topic; with sufficient interest, their post will quickly be promoted to a top position on one service or another, where many thousands of people will see it–and have a chance to act. The Deliciouses of the world have added tremendous speed, transparancy, and power to the system.
It must be a scary time to be a vendor with questionable motives or product quality. For the empowered consumer, though, the story is quite different.
Left by mathewingram.com/work on December 5th, 2005