I suppose I should start reading Digg more often, but I found out about this free book from Eric Rice (via Twitter, of course), who was pointing to an article at the Read-Write-Web about how crowds can be dumb.
Here’s the deal: that 99designs is officially sponsoring a 30 day giveaway of SitePoint’s Photoshop Anthology (for another 17 days!). Sitepoint decided (intelligently) to add a “Digg” button to the landing page (the promo page). But someone killed the ride to the “top” of Digg with this comment (which is totally bogus):
“It’s a trap. When you download it runs a validation check to see if you are running a pirated version of photoshop. Which then logs your ip back to Adobe HQ who then mark the ip address in the automated billing system. You will recieve [sic] a fine for $500 in the next 2 to 5 working days. Congratulations” — luke16
This anecdote relates to my concerns about how easy it can be to manipulate the blogspace.
It relates to another concern as well, and that is digital message literacy. I would not expect the undergrads in my communications class to understand the referenced technologies well enough to know if this is technically possible. But my impression of the folks at Digg (generally geeky early adopters) is different; at least I thought they were more savvy than this incident suggests.
