It’s digg! It’s digg dot com! The ultimate arbiter of what it is and is not important. For thousands of years we’ve let things like corporations, governments, morality and journalistic ethos dictate too much the news that we, the public, are exposed to. Digg breaks that all down. It’s by the people, for the people, and often about the people — the ones that fall over, get hit in the nads, show off their new Apple products, believe Bush supports torture or simply repost some shitty forwarded e-mail you first saw eight years ago.

Yes, it sure is digg. Let’s see what’s in the internet news this week.

What Digg Dugg Most

The information superhighway metaphor mixes poorly with the idea of net neutrality

The Most Dugg Story of the Week (#1 Digg: 7381)

The big story this week was, again, Net Neutrality. This is one of those ever-pervasive political issues that gets a disproportionate amount of play on the internet. It’s kin to the whole violence in video-games issue, where devoted internet users are more concerned about what so-and-so candidate thinks of Manhunt II than they are about the whole Iraq War thing. It’s not that the so-called nerd issues aren’t important — I like bloody video games and unrestricted net access to boobs as much as anyone — but rather that you need to weigh their importance in conjunction with the other issues of the day.

Otherwise you’ll just end up like that environmentalist guy in Ghostbusters, who was all concerned about the environmental impact of the ghost storage unit. Yes, the environment is important. Yes, we all want to save the trees and the earth and the condor. But there are goddamn ghosts in there. Let’s try and see the bigger picture here.

All that said, it’s a good image illustrating a great point.

The Runners Up

Crisis Corpus

What a waste of space this was (<#2 Digg: 6879). Not only is it an issue of dubious relevance — anything that presents politicians, American or otherwise, as nothing more than mustache-twirling super villains sitting around thinking up ways to stick it to the average internet user is bound to be missing more than half the real story — it’s also presented in a terribly hokey chain letter style. It actually includes the line “Digg this for the sake of our freedom.”

Which, really — do you know what people have actually done for the sake of ‘freedom’? They went to war, they chained themselves to buildings, they stared down tanks, they gave up everything they had and more. But, hell, man, I bet those evil politicos we’re totally thrown for a loop when they learned that their evil plot had been exposed as the #1 story on digg.com for Thursday. Clicking stuff is the new actually doing something about it.

Shout out to the digg peeps

The highest video story was this clip from the Colbert Report (#5 Digg: 5385) which just goes to show you that the best way to get somewhere on digg is to mention the site itself. I should totally try that one day.

Do you think he, ever, like, you know, rides the snake?

The high appearance of this story (#11 Digg: 4185) is pretty representative of a sad trend that’s struck the digg community recently: old stuff getting tons of attention for no real reason. This entry is doubly bad because the guy who submitted it maintains that the essay was probably written “while high”. There’s little more annoying than a kid whose just discovered marijuana (or, worse, yet to discover it, but has seen Half Baked a bunch of times) who then decides that anything weirdly funny must have totally been written while high. “Dude, man, that episode of Duck Tales — they must have been so high when they wrote that.”

The truth: nobody writes while they’re high. Do you have any idea how much effort that would take? And how it would do nothing to help how crazy hungry you are at the time?

My favourite: MacBook Pro With All Programs Open at Once

The best thing to appear on the “Most Popular” list this week was a simple one. This guy opened every program on his MacBook Pro at once (#12 Digg: 4170). I’m not sure why it makes me so happy, but it just does. It’s kind of like when I upgraded from my first PC and realized that I could now listen to music while using other programs. That was amazing. And now, theoretically, I could run 70 programs at once. And there’s only been like 15 years between those two events. The future is going to be nuts, isn’t it?