Biz Oppty Taken

Folks,

A while back I averred the news in USA was under govt control... whether or not
I convinced
anyone, the media is open to competition. I have never heard of this site, but
apparently it is
about to overtake the NYTimes website, the nation's newspaper of record, for
readership.

June 25, 2006


Kill the Gatekeepers
Posted by Stephen Carson at June 25, 2006 05:57 PM


Tomorrow Digg.com releases version 3.0. Why is this significant? Take a look at
this
comparison to the New York Times website. Digg.com has about 800,000 unique
visitors
every day and is doubling in traffic every two months.


Digg is a social news site. There are no editors at this site. Instead the users
of Digg submit
stories and vote on the stories that have been submitted. Enough votes get a
story on the
front page. What is really stunning about the fact that the two year old
digg.com is on its way
to surpassing nytimes.com is that Digg has reached this level of traffic while
being focused
entirely on technology news (with politics and other tangentially related topics
slipping in on
the edges). Tomorrow that changes.


Digg 3.0 will add to Technology the following new topics: Science,
Entertainment, World &
Business (which includes Politics), Gaming and Videos. With this change Digg
will directly
compete against the New York Times site and other news sites using a traditional
editorial
model. There are at least two reasons that I find this interesting as a
libertarian. First,
traditional media has acted as a gatekeeper of what is considered newsworthy.
The State has
fared pretty well under this arrangement. We have already seen the Internet
limit the ability of
the State to control information. One can hope that the rise of Digg and similar
sites will give
us more of that.

Secondly, though Digg.com founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson are fond of
using the
term "democracy" to refer to how Digg news works, I do not think this is
democracy in the
negative "god that failed" sense. Rather this is democracy in something closer
to the
"participatory democracy" sense that Rothbard found so promising. Stories do not
succeed on
Digg because they pass muster with the elite gatekeepers but because regular
folks find them
interesting. Unlike the once-every-four-years participation available to most
people in
political democracy, on Digg users can, and do, participate daily even hourly.
Starting
tomorrow getting a pro-liberty story in front of millions of people can be as
simple as
submitting it to Digg, (assuming people find it interesting). And, yes, you can
post a story
about the State's evil doings on your Blog and then immediately submit it
yourself. And the
New York Times can't do a damn thing about it.

****

I went to the site, and a top story was about someone who recycled a cell phone
and got
dinged over $20,000 by Cingular for calls to Brazil. A cautionary tale.
Around Hong Kong
there are people on corners sitting on stools paying cash for used cell phones.
I think I'll nail
mine to a tree and call it art.

http://tinyurl.com/kuoof



John

Bookmark this post --- Email this post