Suffering from insomnia brought on by someone’s 3 day packing procastination (which has now devolved into packing panick), so I’ve been catching up on RSS feeds. Over at TLF, Tim Lee is using the AACS/Digg story to rehash the same tired arguments about DRM and DMCA. We all do it, but I feel like anyone focused on that angle is completely missing the real story.
Over at Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremeski is all over it. The whole thing reminds me of a story about the French Revolution’s Robespierre, who supposedly leapt from his chair as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside and said "I must see which way the crowd is headed,for I am their leader." The real story here is about Web2.0 and its future. As Foremski tells it:
In other words, in Digg’s success is the seed of its own destruction – and it is not alone. Any truly user-driven site can careen out of control at any time. Digg realized that continuing to act within the law seriously threatened to leave the site an abandoned empty husk, that they could not have both legal protection and a business, so they opted for business over no business, albeit one with a huge, gaping chasm that will be excavated by corporate lawyers.
The real story here is about the ephemeral nature of Web2.0 companies. When your value is based on the people you attract more than the value of any product or service you provide, your grasp on success is tenuous at best. You will always be at the mercy of 5-10 percent of your users that are most active and usually most crazy. Web2.0 has a lot of promise, but it also has some potential pitfalls. We’ve just seen one of them. When you’re relying on "mobs," well, you’re relying on MOBS.