Running A Web 2.0 Site is Like Owning a Cyborg Ninja Assasin

…When you have it under control it is a beautiful thing… and when you don’t have it under control *judo death blow!*

I imagine the scene at the Digg offices last week looked a lot like one of the final scenes in the matrix trilogy movie where the Soldiers of Zion are defending the dock area from the millions of sentinels swarming in.

Running a Web 2.0 site means your members are the life blood of your community. They create the content. They create the value. This is a lot of power to put into the hands of strangers.

While watching the diggnanigans unfold the other afternoon I also happened to have the luck of a story get to the front page, where it lasted probably a couple minutes before being bumped off by the HD Key stories.

It all started with one removed story by Digg and Kevin Rose stirred a hornets nest of site visitors and members… within the hour the site was overrun by submissions about the code. What code? Look just about anywhere on the internet right now and you’ll find it. (Stickers, T-Shirts, Color Palettes, Etc.)

Digg was getting hammered so hard at one point it was slowing down FederatedMedia, Digg’s ad service to the point that other sites in the FM network were locking up because of ad scripts stalling. My site being one of those.

Was May 1st 2007 the Day Digg Died? Will it hurt Digg?

No. Simply No. The people that don’t care about whatever the hell the HD DVD code is, don’t give a shit that Digg censored it. The hornets that got riled are of a very tech savvy niche… All this event did was gain huge attention for Digg. I’m sure today’s events will garner Press time in magazines and well read blogs… leading to even more traffic at Digg. If anything this will get new people exposed to Digg and 90% of the time things are good at Digg…

When I first started writing this Kevin Rose & Digg Submitted to the Masses

“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.”

The Power of the Networked People

It does show you the massive power the internet has. Imagine if as a large majority the people who got upset about the “lack of democracy� at Digg.com, got equally upset at the democratic process in our current society. I’m not taking any political sides… but imagine if the people of the world decided they wanted congress to convene on a certain issue… or they would work together with simultaneous requests against the ISPs in DC… No senator is using his blackberry or getting email until congress convenes.

Or a less V for Vendetta example could be, a college student body of 50,000+ students uniting with the power of the internet to voice concerns about the school dropping a program or expelling a student.

The interesting thing about the Events of May 1st - 2nd … is that exactly one year ago a major internet service provider and blogging system serving millions of sites was sent offline by not a horde of internet users, but one internet user and a massive network of bots. Bots are the same little scripted programs that scour the web and update your beloved page rank at google… but they are also the menaces that send out the billions of spam mail every year. They hide themselves in infected user’s computers and than when called to perform a task by the Bot Lords, they awake and work together and then go back into their sleeper cells.

Wired Magazine covered a BotNet story a couple months back and it is definitely worth a read…

“After learning about bots, you might think, ‘I feel hopelessly outgunned and outmatched,’” says Peter Tippett, CTO of security consultancy Cybertrust. “You are.”

“KEITH LASLOP AT PROLEXIC guessed wrong: The attacker didn’t get bored and move on. On May 16, more than a week after the last successful assault on Blue Security, a botnet stormed one of Prolexic’s DNS providers, an outfit called UltraDNS. Because all traffic destined for Prolexic’s subscribers flows through the company’s servers for a pat-down, its DNS is critical to keeping those companies online. So, in one blow, around 15 percent of companies that relied on Prolexic to protect them from DDoS attacks – Blue Security among them – were knocked out cold.”

Wired.com - Attack of the Bots

The People’s Internet

Myspace is the size of the 11th largest country in the world. Web 2.0 is built on user created content and a mass collaborative of content creation… What would happen if these massive networks of people decided to change the world?

How could we harness this technology to do something powerful?

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