My advice to digg is simple. The next time someone offers you money for your company, sell it.

It doesn't matter what the price is. Just sell and get out before it's too late for you business types.

Before your audience learns the truth.

We don't need you Digg.

You are just a centralized server that a community of users gather around. Without those users you are nothing but an empty shell.

This should be a wake-up call for anyone who still runs a compnay that exists because users store their information on your centralized server. Your days are numbered. Your service is not valuable enough to hold your users information hostage.

We've been through this fight before with Napster. It was a good idea for everyone to share their files, but having a centralized server was a weak implementation. When Gnutella came out, with it's decentralized server, you knew it was all over for the labels. Without a center, Gnutella could not be shut down. Once the information was on the internet it could not help but be spread.

How would Digg be helped by this decentralized strategy? For one thing, these idiotic cease and desist letters wouldn't bother you so much, because with no central location to shutdown it would be impossible for you to comply. Sure you could stop hosting the “digg software” for download, but naturally that job could be done by dozens of mirror sites. You could stop allowing “digg traffic” through your servers, but millions of smaller servers would pop up to handle the load.

Of course I'm just talking about Digg “the idea”, ie: the idea of a democratically controlled website where users vote stories up or down, to decide what makes it to the main page. The company Digg would be thoroughly destroyed by this idea because once the code was free and running on the users own computers instead of your centralized servers, you'd have no ability to add advertising to your content or to redirect the users to time wasting pre-load pages. Simply put there would be no way to monetize digg, so as a company it would cease to exist.

Choose now digg. Are you there to become a company that turns a profit for its shareholders or are you a democratic non-profit service for your users? The choice is yours, but if you choose the latter please sell out like the rest of the Web 2.0 crop of data honey pots. Yahoo Flickr, Yahoo Delicious, Google Blogger, Gootube, Wired Reddit, Fox Myspace, etc. Join the club of former free-websites and become the corporate controlled information censor we all know you want to be. Sell out digg, before it's too late.