Breaking the Digg Chain

Posted by John Marcotte on Aug 13, 2008 in Articles | 1 comment

 

I found this image the other day while surfing the net, then found another link to it on Digg. It’s a damn funny photo, but trying to track down its origins shows how it is possible to do the right thing and the wrong thing at the same time.

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Here’s the post on Digg. (link)

 

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The Digg submitter got it from Boing-Boing.

 

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Boing-Boing credited AdFreakas their source.

 

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AdFreak admitted that it “sampled” the image from Dear Jane Sample.

 

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And Dear Jane Sample directly linked to the pic on Dr. No’s Fun Site.

 

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I’d give Dr. No credit for the photo, but it actually comes from his Only In China photographs, many of which still have the logos from Engrish.comattached, so it seems likely he got it from somewhere else. So I have a story with a “Digg Chain” number of 6

1. Badmouth saw it on
2. Digg which linked to
3. Boing-Boing who lifted it from
4. AdFreak who sampled
5. Dear Jane Sample who copied
6. Dr. No’s Fun Site.

Each site took the time to credit where they found the image, but none of them bothered looking any further than one link up the chain. Six seems like a pretty good number to start, but I’m betting that there are longer, more elaborate chains out there. Anyone else got one to top mine?