They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.

Whenever you divert a river through a narrow channel, the result is always raging and torrential. Google, Wikipedia, several blogs published through WordPress and Tumblr, and a few other sites yesterday successfully stuck a few logs in the river. They diverted people's attentions for a moment, and got quite a few of them to agree that changes in the Internet to divert traffic away from content (except for this one) are usually bad.

The result was a logjam of public support, a signal of concerted public opposition to government altering the mechanism of the Internet. Principal sponsors of the SOPA and PROTECT-IP (PIPA) legislation publicly withdrew their support of both bills in their respective houses. Now, despite new markup hearings scheduled for next month, it is extremely unlikely that anti-piracy legislation will emerge from Congress this term.

Victory, it would seem, for the SOPA and PIPA opponents. But we need to ask ourselves, do millions of Internet users truly know more today about the efforts to preserve the Internet and the industries that depend on it, than they did 48 hours ago? Or did Google and Wikipedia just present everyone with yet another popup (like the one with the green button and the red button where the green one says, "YES, I'M 18 OR OVER") and people click the one closest to the content they're really looking for.

But you can surely step in it once

You've often told us this yourself: We in the media are too full of ourselves; we think we're so clever. We can stick our foot in the river, and when it changes direction we proclaim ourselves God and say we, too, can change the course of mighty rivers. We're always trying to make ourselves "mainstream," and we scratch and claw for any means necessary to have Google make us "mainstream."

But we typically fail to keep track of where the river goes from here. Which makes the report this morning from Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood an ominous and foreboding indicator of future events for anyone preparing a "Mission: Accomplished" banner for the victory party. Finke cites an "anonymous" memo from an unnamed Hollywood studio executive (who, despite not being named, openly states he produced a TV series called "24") as making clear that Hollywood's campaign contributions are not guaranteed to anyone. After last Saturday's statement from the Obama Administration, the content industry may be rethinking its support for Democratic Party fundraising efforts in the near-term.

Hollywood, which is in California, the home state of Rep. Darrell Issa, who has become the loudest SOPA opponent in the House. California, with 55 electoral votes. The state where recent polls expressed a preference for that nice fellow who worked with Hollywood to help produce the Salt Lake City Olympics.

In the two decades-plus that I've covered anti-piracy legislation in the U.S., as well as other countries, I've provided the nasty details, the ironic twists, the points of conflict where the legal, creative, and technology worlds fail to connect. And in all of that time, I've been told by editors (when I've had editors), and even frequently by some readers, that folks like you simply don't care. I can still hear the words of one editor who hosted a media workshop resounding in my head: "The Internet is not about facts," he said. "It's about traffic. And you don't get traffic by publishing a bunch of facts, facts, facts, facts."

If anything is less about facts than that particular editor's view of the Internet, it's politics. You can't garner public support or opposition to an issue, I've been told, through a technical recitation of every use case. Instead, it's been suggested, to make an issue popular, you should boil it down to two words that fit on a protest sign. Case in point: Easily the most convincing explanation I've ever read about the potential effects of the anti-piracy system SOPA suggested comes from the blog of an ISP named SoftLayer. It's a detailed technical description of the mess that any DNS server would have to wade through if it were to be amended with instructions preventing it from resolving only certain domain name requests.

As an optimist, I'd think a reasonable person would come away from that blog post convinced that SOPA's suggested remedy was not viable. But you can't fit "DNS Pre-emption Would Break Name Resolution Cycles" on a campaign banner.

Insert cause here

You need something else. Up until 2009, the two-word slogan that anti-piracy opponents went with was "government conspiracy." (Which still made for a big protest sign.) Yet it did not resound with a broader audience, probably because none of the players in the alleged conspiracy had any direct relationship with you, the everyday user. It was all taking place in soundproofed, smoke-filled, underground bunkers, probably with Peter Sellers playing at least three roles.

What ended up working was something more like this: "Censorship bad."

And you know, it's true. Censorship bad. You don't want censorship? Of course not. Here's a nice popup for you. Click the button that says censorship bad. You can do it. Good boy.

Never mind that none of the bills are really about censorship. If they have the same effect, I've been told, it's the same thing. As you go forth about your business today, and as you take heart in the very probable fact that the Internet will not be ruined by an ill-considered bill from folks who didn't comprehend the technology, ask yourself this: How long will the Web maintain its integrity as a source of unfettered, unfiltered facts, facts, facts, facts as long as congresspeople, service providers, content providers, artists, publishers, journalists, political candidates, and you continue to let yourself be used as a tool for someone else's two-word-slogan, private interests?

This is just Reddit's latest strike against SOPA, a topic that has been front-and-center on the site for months now. Its community of users have turned the discussion into a type of digital activism, launching a successful boycott campaign against GoDaddy and rallying support for candidates running against pro-SOPA politicians.

At the same time, it's hard to imagine that too many people who visit Reddit on a regular basis don't know what SOPA is or are unaware of the arguments against it. Those have been plastered all over Reddit's front page for quite some time, and the site's anti-SOPA activity has been the subject of widespread media coverage (a fact that probably contributed to their December traffic explosion). For a healthy percentage of people who try to navigate to Reddit on January 18, the notion that SOPA poses a threat to the Internet as we know it won't exactly be breaking news.

Getting More Big Players on Board

To truly stir up the masses, bigger players like Facebook or Google would need to make some kind of tangible anti-SOPA move, even if it's just a brief homepage takeover or light box with a brief message. Sites of that magnitude (and that reliant on advertising dollars) are unlikely to actually black their services out for a day, but saying a few words about SOPA would at least get the attention of everyday, non-geek people who have never heard of Reddit. Imagine if every Wordpress.com blog went dark for a day or if the admin panel included a message about SOPA as Tumblr has already done.

Given the makeup of Reddit's community and the role the site has already played in anti-SOPA activism, it may actually be the perfect place to try out such an experiment, generating just enough additional awareness without alienating too many existing users. If successful, perhaps the model would expand to other sites. Wikipedia is just one major website that's considering participating in this style of protest against SOPA.

Well, the industrial age has given way to the information age and the balance of power is shifting further and further toward consumers, especially those with actively Web-connected lives. For a telling example, look no further than the recent fiasco surrounding GoDaddy and their now former support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

GoDaddy could have weathered some Twitter name-calling, but when customers started transferring domain names to other providers, the company was forced to publicly reexamine its position on SOPA. In just two days, more than 37,000 domains were transferred from GoDaddy to competing providers. That's a mere drop in the bucket amidst the 50 million domains currently registered with GoDaddy, but if allowed to fester, the company's latest PR disaster could have cost it some serious revenue.

The Crowd or the Mob? Either Way, Its Voices Are Loud and Clear

The lessons of the incident were not lost on other companies, who have begun to pull support for SOPA. It's unlikely that the RIAA and other industry groups will have a change of heart, but companies more closely aligned to the tech industry, such as Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony, saw what happened to GoDaddy and have since reversed their stance as well.

The episode was an instructive one for GoDaddy, but it also speaks volumes about the power the Web and social media hands to everyday people. No longer are things strictly top-down, even if real power and wealth are still largely concentrated among a relative few. In the past, a company of GoDaddy's size could support whatever screwed up and backwards legislation it wanted. Today, if such a move is perceived to strike at the heart of the Internet, the Internet will strike back.

This is not the first example of the power of the crowd. Things got noisy enough on sites like ComcastMustDie.com for the cable behemoth to take a more proactive role in online community management and customer service. As many subscribers will attest, the company still has a long way to go, but it has made progress. You can just about manage to hit the "Tweet" button after typing an angry anti-Comcast sentiment on Twitter before getting a response from one of the company's many social media managers. This may or may not lead to a satisfactory resolution in each case, but at least the company is paying attention. That was something they didn't have to do on quite this scale before.

But Is This a Good Thing?

A recent post on Gawker makes the argument that this phenomenon is actually a bad thing, resulting in a power trip for the Reddit community and leading to some less-than-ideal consequences down the line.

"While great for short bursts of fundraising or getting out a timely message, purely digital mobs like Reddit or the hacktivist collective Anonymous are not well-suited for thoughtful, sustained participation in the political process," writes Adrian Chen. "Fuck the "Wisdom of the crowd." The thinking of the internet hive mind is shallow and frantic, scrambling from one outrage to the next."

To be sure, some of what goes on amongst the Reddit is questionable and not every member of that particular community has their facts straight at all times. But they're far from the only player in these scenarios, even if they do often provide a solid launch pad for digital protest campaigns. What's more remarkable is what the architecture of the Web generally, as well as its social tools, are beginning - yes, only beginning - to enable.

This isn't to suggest that the Internet can solve all of our problems and lead to some utopian, ultra-democratic society. Indeed, most companies won't reverse their stance on SOPA, only the ones that are uniquely threatened by the ire of loud, Web-based communities. Ultimately, the online outcry could fail to block the legislation itself.

Not unsurprisingly, this news does not sit well with many of the Internet's most vocal SOPA opponents, especially on Reddit. A thread that popped up on the site today decries GoDaddy's support for SOPA and encourages users to transfer their domains to another provider. The conversation, which has more than a few choice words for GoDaddy, has grown quite long.

So Why Does GoDaddy Support SOPA Anyway?

"As much as some would like to paint a bleak picture, this debate is not about Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley," reads a statement GoDaddy filed with the U.S. House of Representatives.  "This debate is about preserving, protecting, and creating American jobs and protecting American consumers from the dangers that they face on-line."

GoDaddy goes on to condemn the ease with which people can conduct illegal activity like selling fake drugs and sharing copyrighted material on the Internet today and dismisses concerns about the potential drawbacks of SOPA and the Protect IP Act. Critics claim that this legislation hands too much power over to corporations and authorities to police the Internet and could lead to wholesale censorship online. GoDaddy disagrees.

"This bill cannot reasonably be equated with censorship.  This bill promotes action pursuant to preexisting criminal and civil laws," the company said.  "Not only is there no First Amendment concern, but the notion that we should turn a blind eye to criminal conduct because other countries may take oppressive steps in response is an affront to the very fabric of this nation."

Whatever the logic of GoDaddy's position may be, SOPA critics are not buying it. The calls to boycott the company have begun to spread beyond Reddit and competing domain registrars are using the opportunity to promote their own services. Namecheap, a provider frequently cited in the Reddit thread (Namecheap's social media manager is active in the discussion), has offered up discount codes like BYEBYEGD for users who wish to move away from GoDaddy. Talk of customers moving their domains has even come up in the company's own support forums.

Still, we're talking about a company that has over 50 million domains registered and it's not yet clear how widespread opposition to SOPA is beyond the tech community. Whether or not these efforts will have a sizable impact on GoDaddy's business remains to be seen.

UPDATE: The anti-GoDaddy sentiment has only spread in the last few hours. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham announced that pro-SOPA companies would no longer be welcome at the incubator's Demo Days and other events. Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh has threatened to move more than 1,000 domain names from GoDaddy to another provider and is publicly encouraging Google to reconsider its relationship with GoDaddy as well.

UPDATE #2:Automattic founder and Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg tweeted a link this morning to GoDaddyBoycott.org, a site that encourages users to sign an online petition against GoDaddy and pledge to transfer their domains away from the service. The site looks to be an extension of Fight For the Future, an anti-SOPA advocacy site.

UPDATE #3: In response to the wave of criticism and boycott threats, GoDaddy has revised its stance on SOPA, announcing that they no longer support the legislation in its current form.

ReadWriteWeb will be keeping a close eye on this story and SOPA developments in general in the days and weeks ahead, so stay tuned for more news and analysis.

Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

The indictment (a full copy is here) details Schwartz's purchase of a laptop, which he used to "systematically access and rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR." JSTOR is an online database of academic journals. It provides the full texts of digitized journals, with back issues for some of the most popular ones dating back hundreds of years. A non-profit organization, JSTOR offers its service to primarily academic libraries, who in turn make the content available to their patrons

In a statement today, JSTOR says that last fall and winter it "experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners' content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems."

The indictment details that how Schwartz did just that, from the purchase of the laptop to the creation of ghost accounts on the MIT network, to the break-in of a wiring closet where Swartz had his equipment stored.

Why He Did It

Why would Aaron Swartz want 4 million academic journal articles? Blogger Jason Kottke says "it's not too difficult to guess," and points to Swartz's earlier efforts to download and distribute files from Pacer the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records system. When Pacer was opened to a limited number of libraries, Swartz among others, the New York Times reported, tried to "download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could get to them."

It's not clear if this is what Swartz had in mind by copying the JSTOR database: "liberating," if you will, the journal articles for more open consumption. But in its statement, JSTOR says that it had already reached an agreement with Swartz and had "received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed."

Whatever the intention, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts makes clear the government's position: "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." Even though it appears as though JSTOR was not interested in pressing charges (it has declined to comment specifically about that), the government has leveled some serious felony charges against Swartz.

But rest assured scholars everywhere, even though Swartz allegedly "stole" 4 million journal articles, they're still all available in JSTOR.

In court in Boston today, Swartz plead not-guilty on all counts. His next court date is set for September 9.

Image credits: Flickr user Oneras

This week, an IBM supercomputer dubbed Watson took on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition, pitting natural language processing and machine learning versus two Jeopardy champions. The three-day tournament ended on Wednesday with Watson soundly whooping its competitors. Now that it's over you might wonder how it was done. What problems did the team behind Watson run into along the way? What's next?

If you head on over to social bookmarking site Reddit, you can ask them yourself. The site has gotten the IBM research team behind Watson to agree to hold a Q&A with Redditors and is fielding questions for the next several days.

Currently, users can submit questions to the topic. Over the next several days, users will be able to vote on these questions and the IBM Research Team will answer them on Tuesday, Feburary 22 at noon EST.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote today about what he thinks makes Reddit as successful as it is (it recently broke 1 billion monthly pageviews), pointing to the IAmA subreddit. IAmA "is an endless treasure trove of fabulous content being created within reddit," wrote Ohanian.

To take part in the Q&A, simply head on over, sign up for a free account if you don't have one, and fire away. 

Oh, and currently, the number one question? "Can we have Watson itself/himself do an AMA?" The answer? "We're working on it ;)"

Former ReadWriteWeb writer Frederic Lardinois wrote up the numbers on his personal blog Newsgrange (we miss you, Frederic!) and said he did not believe that Digg's troubles this year were the cause of Reddit's growth. But I think it's hard to believe that wasn't a major factor. Digg has long been the much bigger social news site but has slowed to a crawl after users grew unsatisfied with changes made by management seeking to make the site more democratic, more personalized and more mainstream. The resulting exodus couldn't help but have contributed at least some growth to Reddit, a site that's very similar in function if very different in tone. Either way, the moral of the story may be that social news, voted on by users in aggregate, is not dead.

Meanwhile, things at Reddit tend to have a very different tone and that was evident in the year-end round up. Reddit users pride themselves in their generosity towards the rest of the world. The site raised almost a million dollars for Haiti and other global crises this year. It also began a new program wherein users can donate their activity data on the site to independent researchers, something which thousands chose to do and which we wrote about enthusiastically in October as a potential model for all other social sites.

While comparisons with Digg are hard to avoid (Digg was bigger, is far more juvenile, into cults of personality, swamped with spam-for-hire sleaze-bags, antagonistic towards women, unsuccessful in building niche communities and without an attractive mobile site) it's only fair to acknowledge that building sites like these is much harder than it might appear. Yahoo's Digg copy-cat site Buzz, for example, was heralded as the game-ending giant entry into this market when it was launched two and a half years ago but the December announcement of its pending closure warranted less than a sniffle compared to the uproar about Yahoo saying it was closing social bookmarking service Delicious.

For reference, the 800 million monthly pageviews Reddit saw in December is the same number that Netscape.com was seeing in 2006 when AOL decided to turn it into a social news Digg-competitor. That effort angered Netscape news portal users, who revolted until the social news effort was moved to Propeller.com, itself just a memory now.

Meanwhile, Reddit keeps getting better and much, much bigger. Or, if this was as they say on Reddit too long didn't read, here's how the team summarizes the news: "2010 was a great year for reddit, and 2011's gonna be so awesome it'll make 2010 look like 2009."

Reddit's goal for this data is to see it used to create a recommendation engine - in particular a system that would highlight some of the niche communities on Reddit that are a great place to find good topical content, but that too few people on the site have discovered. Now that the data is out in the wild, however, any number of analyses can be performed on it - and no one knows what kinds of observations about the relationship between people, web content, voting and news will be discovered. One little account preference opens up a world of opportunities: "allow my data to be used for research purposes."

"It's great to have these kinds of data dumps available for research," says Joel Spolsky, co-founder of the popular StackOverflow network, which makes its user data available in a bulk dump every month, under a Creative Commons license. "We've had several academics analyzing our data dump and learning interesting, measurable, scientifically relevant things about online communities. You never know what's going to come out of it."

Chris Dixon, co-founder of recommendation service Hunch, said the Reddit data and recommendation effort are a "great project." "I think I'll have our devs hack something together using the Hunch API," he said. "We have a blog recommender widget [of our own] coming out soon." Dixon's company is one of the most prominent startups aiming to build a "taste graph" and Hunch already offers recommendations that impress many people, on a wide variety of topics.

Real-world recommendations, profile analysis for increased self-awareness and scientific insights into the nature of online life: those are the kinds of things people are building now with publicly available social network user data.

Nowhere in the world is there more opportunity to develop such insights based on user data than on Facebook. Facebook used to hand over data dumps of its users activities to big companies doing research without communicating that to the users. Now, a much larger company, Facebook is maddeningly unwilling to offer bulk data export for research and analysis. Perhaps in part because people are so upset whenever the release of data is perceived as a violation of online privacy.

That's an easy problem to solve, though, if Reddit is any indication. Just ask users if they want to check one box: "allow my data to be used for research purposes."

Please, Facebook?

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Digg vs Reddit Market Share

Standoff

What is clear, though, is that Digg's users are not backing down - and neither is Digg's management. User revolts are nothing new for Digg, but this time it looks like Digg's management is not prepared to back down. According to former Digg engineer Ian Eure, Digg may not even have the ability to roll its service back to the old version anyway. Digg's CEO Kevin Rose does promise, however, that many of the old features Digg's users are now clamoring for will come back in one form or another. The question now is if the site's most fervent users will come back once all the issues with Digg v4 have been resolved, or if they will simply move on to another site like Reddit.

While the Reddit team only offered its "undying gratitude and an optional trophy", it looks like users have gotten some new site functionality and even a potentially more stable site in return for their donations.

As of yesterday, when one of Reddit's continually-pesky servers crashed yet again, a new set of features were added site-wide and the Reddit team took advantage of the downtime to swap out some hardware.

According to a blog post by Reddit programmer Mike Shiraldi, the site now offers a sort function, meaning everyone can sort their userpages. If you're familiar with Reddit, then you might also be familiar with the often enigmatic mascot in the masthead. If the allusion seems unclear, a mouseover will now show some titletext and decipher the daily changing mascot.

For gold users, Reddit will also be adding "moar comments", loading up to 1,000 comments at a time. I don't know about you, but I often go to Reddit for the detective-esque crowdsourcing of information that happens in the comments, so loading more at once is always great.

The biggest change of all, however, has to be the swapping out of a flaky server. When the site went down yet again yesterday (it's been experiencing some downtime as of late), the team took the downtime as an opportunity to swap out some bad hardware. While Shiraldi warns that "there may be some initial issues while we bring it up to speed", he notes that this is a change that should benefit all Redditors, paying or not.

While there was certainly some doubt floating around the blogosphere when the site came out asking for donations, it seems to have paid off. Reddit is a perfect example of what all that "community building" hype is all about - build a devoted base of users and you can offer them little more than a virtual trophy and get enough out of them to put in new servers and hire some much needed developers.

Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community.

Much of the reason why Slashdot isn't impacting the social Web community is its focus on heavy duty tech. Slashdot's byline is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." That captures not just who its core audience is (nerds), but its attitude to what is newsworthy (only stuff that "matters" to technical people). Slashdot founder Rob Malda wrote on his web site that typical topics include "Linux, Open Source Software, Legos, Games, Star Wars, Science [and] Technology."

Slashdot is targeted to engineers and programmers - and makes no apologies for it. However this relatively narrow focus means that Slashdot has not grown to have broader appeal, like StumbleUpon and Digg. However, why then is Hacker News - which is also targeted to programmers - doing so well in Woopra's statistics?

The obvious answer is that Slashdot has lost users to Hacker News and other tech news communities. The following monthly traffic chart from Quantcast suggests that users have migrated from Slashdot to other sites. The trend over the past few years has mostly been a downward pattern (although note that these are estimated figures only).

Do You Still Read Slashdot?

We asked our community via Twitter: do you still read Slashdot?

The following responses were from ex-Slashdot users who have either reduced the time they spend there or drifted away from the site entirely:

@Transition: "On occasion. I've been on /. since 1998, but don't follow it as much anymore. Never got into the others, but I should."

@peterc: "Still visit /. once a week or so but no longer contribute (used to be a heavy user). Use HN & Reddit mainly now, never Digg."

@morganpyne: "I was a longtime Slashdot reader (5-digit ID, lurker way before signing up), but it became irrelevant a few years ago. So... no."

@ceesaxp: "/. always was a much different place from digg or reddit. But you're right I'm reading it much less, hardly once in a month these days."

@jezlyn: "I haven't read /. in many years. Got tired of the snotty attitude and comment wars."

Others Still Loyal, But Frustrated By Slow Social Media Take-up

Another reason for Slashdot's decline in the social Web has been its slow uptake of social media technologies. It only recently introduced Facebook and Twitter integration, many months after similar news communities had added them. In addition, Slashdot has historically favored stories submitted from traditional media, over 'new media' such as blogs. Both of these things have made Slashdot seem behind the times and a bit too closed minded.

However, Slashdot obviously still has a core and dedicated audience. For example Adam Monago, a VP at a California IT company, said via Twitter that he still reads Slashdot. "It continues to have a community feel that the other sites you mention do not have," he commented. By that he meant that the other sites (like Digg, Hacker News and Reddit) "do not have [an] identifiable set of traits or ideals that bind their users in the same way as Slashdot." Certainly, Slashdot's audience shares a common set of values around open source and scientific discovery.

Some people also complained that Slashdot was too slow to feature breaking news. "I catch a Tweet from @slashdot now and then," remarked freelance web developer @pluc, "[but] it didn't ride the realtime wave like others." Likewise, library student @battmutler commented that Slashdot "seems to always be 12-36 hours behind the curve." Although to be fair, a story can sometimes take 12 or more hours to hit the Digg frontpage too.

Slashdot continues to have a passionate, intelligent community. However the impact that this community has on the social Web is minimal, according to Woopra's statistics. Slashdot is no longer the powerhouse it once was.

Let us know in the comments if you still use Slashdot; and if so, whether you are happy with the experience there or would like to see it improve.

Now, the website is saying that "'Experts' misunderestimate our traffic, and we don't know why".

We've been kinda bummed at reddit these days. It seems like every week something comes up that slows performance to a crawl or even leads to a total site outage. And we almost never get a chance to release new features anymore. [...] The bottom line is, we need more resources.

The problem the site is having now, it says, is that "advertisers generally don't trust Google Analytics numbers" and "have their own preferred sources of traffic information that they put their faith in." According to Google Analytics, Shiraldi writes, Reddit has seen more than 8,000,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 400,000,000 pageviews. "The numbers are very accurate, because there's a blog of Google Analytics javascript on every reddit page that lets them directly measure our traffic."

Shiraldi then goes on to compare the numbers provided by a number of web traffic measurement services. Compete.com reports 927,000 unique visitors a month - around 7 million less than Google Analytics. Quantacast, meanwhile, reports 10 million visits, which Shiraldi says is anywhere from a half to quarter of the true numbers.

The problem here, according to Shiraldi, is that advertisers are relying on numbers from third-party measurement services that just aren't true. In the site's efforts to raise more money - and therefor hire more engineers, buy more servers, increase performance and continue the cycle - these numbers appear to be hurting its bottom line.

The problem Shiraldi points to looks like one that would have broad implications for any number of websites trying to make a buck of advertisements and traffic. If all of the web measurement services out there have this large of a discrepancy between them, who's really making out in the end? Does a site just need to find the most favorable analysis and stick with it or should something be done to reconcile the numbers?

This is Lynn LaVallee's monument to the composition of the Web: "I'm a Web engineer," she explained to the L.A. Times, "so the tattoo represents the proper separation layers of a Web document. The first file is the structural layer - which is the house. The second is the presentational layer - CSS - and the third is the behavioral layer, which is JavaScript."

RSS

Wordpress/Drupal

Google

Farmville Hot Rod Tractor

@critter

Rackspace

Cisco

Fork Bomb

(Don't know what a fork bomb is?)

Firefox/Safari

Android/BlackBerry App World

@BaltimoreMD Fail Whale, Reddit Alien, Free Wi-Fi

Want more? Geekytattoos.com is a good place to start. Got your own geek ink you want to share? Let us know about it in the comments.

Lead photo: fiatlux. Lynn LaVallee: jayzombie. RSS: gorillasushi, bestdamntech, creepysleepy. Wordpress/Drupal: bakershours.com, vegasgeek, Dries Buytaert. Google: ivanmor, growabrain, mezdeathhead. Farmville Hot Rod Tractor: geekytattoos.com. @critter: digitalpapercuts, korneliuz, freezerburns.com, critterscode.com, trioutnc.com. Rackspace/Cisco: MarJor24, simonov, geekologie.com. Fork Bomb: silveiraneto. Firefox/Safari: liveneedle.com, fisherwy.blogspot.com, bmezine.com. Android/BlackBerry App World: ivanmor, gadgets.boingboing.net, blindfutur3. @BaltimoreMD Fail Whale, Reddit Alien, Free Wi-Fi: supeertakai, urdb.org, geekytattoos.com.

Using crowdsourcing to combat spam submissions on an already trained populous that already votes on everything seems like a smart way to outsource an otherwise difficult task.

In addition to these problems, the site also found that the generally American make-up of the moderators left those of you in Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the future stuck with valid submissions sitting in spam boxes, as the moderators were fast asleep.

Thus, Reddit has "deputized" its users, enlisting them all in the battle against spam submissions by including a box that will appear "at the top of the front page every once in a while".

Average Reddit users will have the ability to pitch in and say whether or not a specific submission is indeed spam or was inadvertantly flagged, much the way you can train your email program to detect spam.

We asked Jared Goralnick, founder of AwayFind, how this might differ from standard spam filters on email, to which he replied that the method itself was not novel, but "taking just a few of the messages (the quarantine) and making them very prominent (the the front page of the site) seems novel".

The sort of filtering Reddit is employing, he said, elaborates on the old binary sort of spam filtering, where something is either spam or not spam, adding the quarantine as the third category. While this is not new, the method of dealing with that third category is interesting.

"In short, the technology behind their decision has a deep history..." he said, "...they've always been very community-oriented and this seems like a good next step."

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It's not perfect but it's pretty great. It's reminiscent of the excellent StumbleUpon Video but more timely, less repetitious and less full of commercials. The main question that comes to mind is: why hasn't Digg launched something like this yet?

Note that the video that appears first in the "best of the web" section is one long, juvenile joke about sexual violence from the comedy group "The Whitest Kids You Know." So not all readers here may appreciate the audience on the site and their taste. Unfortunately that's what you often get when you open up editorial selection to a vote of computer savvy folks who like to populate these kinds of sites. It's rule by the loudest voices with the most time on their hands.

The service isn't technically perfect either. On Safari we've needed to refresh the page regularly in order for it to load. You can't vote videos up or down from the Reddit.tv page - the designer says he wants to keep it simple but that may come soon. There doesn't appear to be a very high threshold for the number of votes a video needs to appear on Reddit.tv. Several we saw were just submitted. Finally, it would be great if there was a way to have continuous full-screen viewing of these videos. That might be easier said than done but it would add a lot to the user experience.

Those issues aside, though, Reddit.tv is pretty cool. It's a good way to see popular current events and cool science and tech videos in particular. The inclusion of TED Talk videos is great; those help balance out the rampant stupidity you find on any video sharing service.

This kind of viewing experience is much nicer than what Digg offers in its video section. Surely it's only a matter of time until Digg does something similar to this. In the meantime, if you want to watch up-to-date online videos that have been voted up by a crowd of geeks, Reddit.tv may now be your best option.