Just saw this post on the Digg blog from Kevin , the founder of digg. They are willing to go "down in flames" rather than make their users bow their heads to the demands of a big company. Good on you digg ! Here is a copy of the blog post:

"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"

The words Digg , Key hddvd and DVD are among most popular on Twitter during the news breaking of the HD-DVD Hex key crack and related articles being withdrawn and blocked from Digg. The articles and key numbers have since been restored to Digg in only what is an assumed attempt at re-gaining the loyalty of it's democratic readership.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here is a picture from the Twitterverse site, which tracks popular words on Twitter.

btw.  found some other interesting scandals within this news.  One was a video of 3 US service men getting "sniped' in Iraq and the second is a scandal of major proportions to do with the US Coast Guard and the mess up of portions of $24B contracts.   

This has been news for a week or so now but J. Angelo Racoma has an article on the subject, along with Steve Rubel's version on what happened. Good to see that the real story come out, Steve shouldn't be dragged through the coals over a simple tweet that was really saying that he doesn't read the paper version of the Mag, (but he does read the online version, RSS feeds, links back to their articles and links back to their sister mag's articles too.). It really was just a misunderstanding due to the brief nature of the 140 character "tweets" on Twitter.

This doesn't necessarily just relate to Twitter, Steve or PC mag. It relates in general and brings up a wider topic to all companies and their policies (or lack of policies) for employee blogging, twittering, message boards, social networks and and any other outside communications by employees over the Internet. Although an individual's post on some obscure message board may not be intended to be the official view of his employer, it just may be taken that way, especially if it is left with the email domain of the employer.