Archive for May, 2007

Bruce Willis on AintItCool. Celebrity Commenters.

Sunday, May 13th, 2007

An AintitCool News post criticizing the upcoming Die Hard 4′s PG-13 rating drew the usual reader commentary… but then an interesting series of posts by a “Walter B”:

I am pleased to see Vern, and everyone who responded to Vern’s rant exhibit such emotion over DH4. But as someone who worked on the picture, and has seen a cut of it, I would suggest that all the yakkin’ over the PG-13 issue hang onto their weapons for now. This episode if Die Hard is as good, if not better than the first Movie. And I was there for that one too.

As it turns out, Walter B ended up being “Walter Bruce Willis”, or simply Bruce Willis, the actor. The thread went through the usual back and forth about people not believing it was truly him, but an video iChat session with Mr. Willis demonstrated that it was really him.

I like Bruce Willis as much as the next guy, but what I found most interesting about the thread is that it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that someone like Bruce Willis is keeping tabs on threads on projects they are involved in.

It’s natural for anyone to see what people are saying about them and the projects they are working on. In fact, the founding premise behind Technorati… the concept of vanity searches.

I fully expect that many of key players in their respective industry are watching the top tier sites for their niche.

The Digg Revolt, May 1, 2007

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

Some people said that it wouldn’t work… users moderating the stories and in control of the content? Well, Digg.com worked surprisingly well all things considered. Beyond the digg-gaming issues, users tended to “digg” up interesting stories and suppress the bad ones.

But a lot of that changed tonight…

The trigger: How I got banned from Digg
The official response: What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?
The digg user response? utter chaos (screenshot). The entirety of the digg.com homepage is made up of angry responses.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out — the first Web 2.0 Revolt?

Will it all blow over and digg will be back to itself in a few days?
Will it hurt digg substantially?
Will it boost digg to new heights of popularity?

The most ironic thing is that there isn’t much that they can do about it… since the site content is generated by the users, they can choose to close down the site perhaps… but the site will then screech to a complete halt. What can they do but wait it out?

Update: The resolution.