Classic Articles: The Dugg Articles

Note: Since I will be gone most of this week to the International Plagiarism Conference and unable to post new material, I’m doing a short series highlight past posts from the various sites I write for. This post is the first in that series.

Since I started Plagiarism Today, I have had two articles reach the front page of Digg. Though many more have been submitted, only two have made it all the way to the top, thus causing the famous “Digg Effect”.

The first was entitled What Porn Can Teach us About Piracy. The article details what the adult entertainment industry was doing to combat piracy and how the online industry was thriving despite heavy piracy of its works.

While the article was accurate when it was written in December of 2006, new information makes this much more out of date, especially as it relates to the bricks and mortar adult industry.

The second one was entitled The DMCA on Social News Sites. It detailed the the DMCA takedown policy of five of the most popular social news sites and was a precursor to the “DMCA Seven” series.

This story was submitted before but famous Digg Revolt but ended up being caught up in the backlash. The article required nearly 1000 Diggs to reach the front page as a result of the site’s algorithm changes during the conflict and only appeared after Digg changed its stance.

Also, the site also appeared on Slashdot once with a less-than-favorable review of the article entitled The “New” Plagiarism. Most of the criticisms were due to my poor headline choice and poor writing in the article. It was one of my least favorite articles when I posted it and I deserved the beating I took for it.

It was also the first time the site was taken down due to a traffic spike making it an all-around learning experience for me.

Finally, I want to thank the users of StumbleUpon who read this site. There have been far too many articles to count that have seen huge spikes through that service. It is clear that this site has a lot of enthusiastic StumbleUpon users among its ranks and, for that, I am very grateful.

Thank you all for your support and help in getting the word out about this site!