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Digg is the real deal for web 2.0, in the sense that, for all the hype, it does absolutely nothing new but is about to render obsolete, geek central itself, Slashdot. Zawodny goes through the usual ideas as to why digg is successful – and then hits it on the nail – ‘Lets face it. The slashdot guys are getting old’. Sure there are some improvements over Slashdot in the way the Digg does things, but this is not the product shakeup of Google Maps vs. Mapquest. Digg wins because the community has more vitality. Digg is about fashion, it makes Slashdot look like a bunch of ageing rockers. We are seeing the first generational switch in web applications – and that is really web 2.0. If this is natural churn, then someday someone else will beat Digg, and if this is a precedent then the lifespan of an otherwise…

It seems that a war is brewing between the carriers (Verizon) and the service providers (Google). The carriers want to tax revenue generating traffic based upon the revenue potential rather than the traffic, and they want to charge both the sender and the receiver of the traffic. This is like charging Walmart trucks more than other trucks for a bridge toll, just because Walmart make more money than other companies, but where the equivalent of the toll has already been paid for by Walmart’s customers. One can assume that everyone is being superficially friendly but playing hardball in the background. The problem is that its impossible for the carrier to know the value of a single ‘bit’, since it varies according to what the ‘bit’ contains – is it part of an app, an ad, a video or text. Verizon want a slice of the action because they know that…

The Ironic thing about Steve Rubel’s ‘Google Book Search Hack’, which he jokingly said he was posting because he was in the mood to ‘get Digged’ – and was, is that it contains all the right keywords to attract ‘Diggs’, but no actual information. Steve’s post is basically a description of how to type words into a search engine. So the irony is this – by posting a description about how to do something ‘technical’ that isn’t and using words like ‘O’Reilly, hacks, Digg, Google’, you can become one of the top links on a techy links site. This may seem trivial – but I think it is a good example of why the Digg voting system does not really work in its current form, unless the algorithm for vote weighting is much more sophisticated. Micro Persuasion: Read Most of O’Reilly’s Hacks Books for Free Using Google