Had to post about this craziness today about the HD-DVD Hex key scandal. Here is an article about someone trying to post an article to digg and also got banned from digg over this issue today.

By the looks of it, they are seeing the news and trying to restore the articles and regain the faith of the public. The brewhaha continues...

Here is an overview of what happened with the key and how it got out .

Tried to read at least four other articles about this that were listed on digg. Some were crashed because of too much traffic and some just not working.

Just came across this and thought would let you all know. It is an alternative to the official twitter badge to put on your website or blog (the one you can see on the left column here). It looks like has pretty much the same features but looks a bit better laid out with an easy button to go to your home page on Twitter. Looks like you can change colors etc.

Widgetbox Twitter Badge

On this page it looks the same as the original twitter badge.

 But on the home page of widgetbox, you can do a preview (click on the twitter widget link) and you get this..

Haven't tried it and don't know what the difference is, if anyone does, let us know how it is in the comments.  I will stay with the official one for now.

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DVD are among most popular on Twitter during the news breaking of the HD-DVD Hex key crack and related articles being withdrawn and blocked from Digg.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.   

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"

We are always looking for new ideas to let people know about to make Twitter more useful for them for business, their job, getting the message out, for fun. Here is a good idea about using twitter for IT support , if that is your thing, this is for you.

Here is an article by Stephen Francoeur that has some suggestions for using twitter for reference and research . They even list a couple of libraries that are already using Twitter and how they are using it. He then goes on to a couple of other suggested methods to use Twitter in a research or library scenario. Happy researching!