Biz Oppty Taken

Re: [spiers] Biz Oppty Taken

And look! Todays #6 story is how Apple's Chinese
factory, Foxconn, admits to breaking Chinese labor law
and running a Dickensonian sweatshop.

--- John Spiers wrote:

> 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
>

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