Guy pointed towards Pligg in his “Links for 2006-01-14″ post. Having played around with Digg for a while, I was amazed at the similarity of the two sites. In fact, except for Digg’s use of a blue-and-yellow theme and Pligg’s use of a green-and-orange (blecch) theme, it was hard to ascertain the difference between the two. Digg, having been around a lot longer, was orders of magnitude busier, but both sites work the same way, allowing users to post stories and cast votes on stories, with the most popular links migrating to the site’s front page.

The big difference between the two is that Pligg is open source and is already being used to create more specialized versions of Digg. None of these new versions has truly taken off yet, but that hasn’t daunted the creators of such sites as Staralicious, APBNews, SpyMy and iTunesLove.

However, it is that last site, iTunesLove, and another site created by the same person—LinuxFilter—which have sparked an interesting controversy. Both of these sites were created by Steve Mallett, an editor and blogger with the O’Reilly Network. A Digg fan, looking at the CSS code behind LinuxFilter and iTunesLove noticed that the CSS file was absolutely identical to the CSS behind Digg.

Bristling with outrage, this fan set up a blog on Blogger.com called Steve’s Theft, and posted his first (and, so far, only) entry, entitled, “Steve Mallett from O’Reilly has stolen digg’s code.” The entry was filled with invective, accusations, and… well… proof that—on the surface— his claims were accurate: the code really was identical. He then posted a link to his story on Digg, where it was read and voted on by (at this writing) 2832 viewers, making it a very popular front page story.

There is a problem, of course: Steve Mallett didn’t steal the code. He merely downloaded the pligg package which contained the code and installed it on his server. So, it must’ve been the pligg people who stole the code, right? Not exactly: pligg was an English port of the Spanish Digg clone Menéame—and that’s where the “theft” actually occurred. Commenters on the Steve’s Theft blog pointed it out, and so did ZDnet’s Richard McManus and O’Reilly’s Nathan Torkington. There was even a “retraction” article posted on Digg which has garnered 1914 “diggs” itself.

But, the web has a long memory, and searching for Steve Mallett on Google displays the Steve’s Theft article as the 4th result. (According to McManus’ article, a commenter noted that he’d created a Steve Mallett Wikipedia entry about the controversy, but, maybe having learned from the Seigenthaler mess, Wikipedia has already removed the entry.)

It’s no surprise that internet users are always primed for outrage, especially on techie issues dealing with such topics as the religion of Open Source or Mac vs. PC. But the problem here is the potential for personal damage. A site like Digg, with it’s value-free “Digg this” button has the potential to instantly ruin reputations, promulgate lies and urban myths, and is strongly resistant to correction or refutation. This problem is not limited to the internet: newspapers have been burying their “Corrections” columns deep inside their less-read pages for years, while online news sites often hide corrections by amending posted articles without notice. The problem is inherent to the structure of the web itself. Sure, a site like Wikipedia can institute policies to contain or reverse damage, since it is a centralized repository. But the “small pieces, loosely joined” paradigm of—for want of a better term—Web 2.0 means that every out-of-context satement, every libelous post, every Photoshopped image may be linked to, tracked-back from, fed, aggregated and spread with infinite speed, out from anyone’s control.

Despite what we web denizens believe, the influence of the net is not yet a predominant force in the world. Digg may or may not last, but sites like it will forever pop up and controversies like the Digg/Pligg/Menéame issue will continue to appear. I’m sure we can agree that lawsuits and slooooow-moving regulation is not the solution. But, now, while this new, truly interconnected web is still growing, is the time to figure out how to innoculate our web-wide conversation before it becomes infected and nearly useless with the equivalents of viruses and spam. Ideas or suggestions, anyone?

Technorati Tags: digg, pligg, web_2.0, steve_mallett, o’reilly, meme