It's an interesting notion that the Digg brand is about "Digging" (the act of recommending), obviously a really broad concept that provides Digg with a wide avenue for expansion.
The challenge for the brand will be to expand its audience. It's got to use its new services to attract new users, rather than just broadening its relationship with existing users.
The idea that those who try to restrict information on the Internet end up generating unintended consequences has been around for a few years. It's called the "Streisand Effect", named because of the case where the famous singer tried to prevent a photographer from putting the location and photograph of her Malibu home on his website. The fuss ended up drawing everyone's attention to her home and the photograph spread around the web like a wildfire.
Other cases include; the raid on P2P site Pirate Bay, Scientology story leaks and a complaint against Fox's Married with Children.
Digg has been trying to stop its users from posting the code to break the encryption on HD-DVD discs for sometime. It made a decision to pull down posts which angered the community and all hell as broken loose.
Clearly the community is the brand and it has to listen or face the consequences of loosing them. It's interesting to see how fast this happened, how "violent" it was and how rapdily the brand responded. There are lots of lessons here, that we will attempt to explain and gather from other sources in the next couple of days.
Here is how in one day Digg explained and rectified its actions and used its blog as its mouthpiece.
1pm Yesterday
Hey all,
I just wanted to explain what some of you have been noticing around some stories that have been submitted to Digg on the HD DVD encryption key being cracked.
This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.
Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.
Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information - and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.
Thanks for your understanding,
Jay
9pm YesterdayDigg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…
In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin
Although Digg isn't yet the mass market place of attention, it indicates that in an over abundant world, attention is fleeting at best.
It demonstrates just how hard it is to get noticed and even if you manage it, attention quickly wanes.
These days there are two things brands need to do:
1. Get noticed
2. Sustain attention
Both things are getting tougher and tougher to achieve, but as we keep saying, it's all about doing more and experimenting more.