Blogger Sues Digg

I’ve had it.
No really.
I’ve become addicted to Digg and I can’t stop.

Digg, if you’ve been living in a cave the past year, is a tech-centered news aggregator that has become popular amongst bloggers and web sorts. The only problem is, I’m addicted to it.

Oh sure. It starts out simple enough… a little article about some cool css sites, then a free fonts site or two… The next thing you know I’m three days behind my deadline for a requirements doc, and I’m neck deep in some bizarre ball drawing thing, with another window running some Javascript based adventure game – that I don’t even WANT to play!

So, as far as my understanding of the law goes, I need real damages. Well, how about I haven’t done crap in over two weeks, my cats have lost (collectively) fifteen pounds, my eyes are going bad, and today is the last day of an invoice period where I’ve made NO MONEY.

Diggs fault.

So I am going to call a lawyer, and initiate a damages claim against Digg for wasting my time learning about some guy that created an animation out of the Bigfoot images, or another website where you can create a flipbook-style animation, or this other one I read where you can…

If you’ve experienced a loss of your life because of Digg, share your comments…

Where’s the Whiteout

Today Reuters was running a story about a British kid who came up with a new idea for selling ad space on his homepage.  He was brainstorming ways to pay for college, and thought if he could sell pixels for $1 apiece, he could raise a million bucks.  What if.. right?

He went about creating a homepage composed of a grid of small 10 pixel by 10 pixel square boxes.   There are 10,000 of these small boxes, layed out in 100 columns and 100 rows.  Advertisers bought these boxes, sometimes clustering them together to (presumably) be easier to recognize amongst the others.  Clicking on the box launches the advertisers website.  No surprises.

Maybe there are.

The testimonials page lists a few letters written by their advertisers, each describing how the Milliondollarhomepage drove astonishing levels of traffic to their websites.  They each praise the originality of the concept, endorsing its brilliance, telling their personal story of how the site has brought them business.

Admittedly some of the numbers are truly amazing.  While the letters aren’t dated, some of them reference purchases made early in the release of the site.  After staring at the site for awhile, I’m lead to believe that the early adopters were the ones that gained the most, as their blocks were probably a little easier to see with fewer in competition for the visitors mouse click.

So as of this writing the creator is a little over 80,000 pixels short of hitting his million pixel goal.  Its been around six months in the making, and he deserves the recognition he’s getting, if for the originality alone. But it makes me think about newness and the world around us.

It seems that we value originality, but mostly to the extent that we can exploit it.

Some other examples that come to mind are the old automobile ’skins’ that were hip in the late 1990’s, or more recent stories about people selling their foreheads for advertising, naming their babies after a company or product…

If you read the hype at the time, one might think that there would be classrooms around the country filled with kids named Scion, or Twinkie.  And imagine the office with people wandering around featuring Denny’s or Dermologica tattoos prominently centered above their eyes.

But the fact is that originality itself isn’t that interesting.  Advertising money knows that the best way to message is through the media.  It’s cheaper, it blankets the potential market, and you don’t have to think about it much.  Those early advertisers on the Million Dollar Homepage knew that for such a small price they would be riding the initial rush of traffic, and that alone – good idea or not – was enough to do what they wanted.

It seems like it used to be that a good idea was intended to serve a purpose.  Many were anyway…  Inventions were the result of making something simpler, safer, better maybe… and many of them have lasted, like self-inflating air matresses, or safety razors, or light bulbs…

But now the only value is firsts.  I spotted a few clones of the Million Dollar Homepage, and none of them have more than a couple of advertisers.  It’s like a self-inflicted pyramid scheme.  Some things that weren’t firsts have made such improvements that they’ve become the profitable ones… Craigslist comes to mind.  eBay maybe.. But it has become prohibitively expensive to create actual thingsany more.  I don’t know if its start up costs, patents, product liabilities, marketability…  But something has changed since the day of some Monkees mom creating the next big thing in office supplies…

Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Imitation is suicide.” 

I bet he didn’t have a webpage.

Comes the Day

Less a fad than an eventuality.  Writing for a living makes words seem like #15 cans of tomatoes at a grocery store checkout…  I spend so much time shaping them into things that people use on each other.  Use them to influence, to coerce, to inspire if I’m lucky. 

Too often lately there’s not enough time to tell stories, just enough to rip a copy of the last string that worked on the last Joe or Jane.  Nothing unique, doesn’t need to be.  Just sell.  Sell to get paid to buy more to eat and drive so I can fit in better where I work to write to get paid to buy more stuff…

I’ve begun to separate from the understanding that all of life is suffering.  I’m over the suffering, and it seems like the only suffering left is thinking about it.  Joy is what I’ve made.  It lives in the memories of people that I’ve written for, and it comes back to me.  It is what’s left when you take everything away.  It’s the quiet, it’s the snow, it’s the darkness or the light.  It’s just joy.