Trouble's a-brewing on the net between Jason Calacanis - the founder of Weblogs, Inc - and the beer-chugging brains behind popular vote-for-the-news website Digg.
Things started when Calacanis, in his new job heading Netscape.com, decided to switch the site over to a Digg-style effort where users bookmark stories and then vote for the ones they like to get more prominence. This made Digg a bit itchy, by all accounts - particularly when Calacanis said he'd offer $1000 a month to the best bookmarkers from other sites if they'd work for Netscape.
Digg's founders got shirty and Kevin Rose called the Netscape offer "a clever PR stunt" and slagged off Calcanis in the site's video podcast, DiggNation. Calacanis, suddenly assuming the moral high ground, explained his thoughts and said he was "saddened that Kevin has reduced it to personal attacks".
OK, so it's that is only just about threatening to spill out of its teacup. But it does all revolve around the wider questions of the next-generation web - particularly the one thing a lot of people seem to ignore... money. Is it right to pay people?
News organisations pay their own content contributors (we're called journalists) but the general principles of Web 2.0 likes things to be a bit more, well, inexpensive. When I spoke to Yahoo's man-with-a-plan Bradley Horowitz last year (he's the one who has encouraged the purchase of Flickr, Delicious et al) I asked him if in some ways social software wasn't just a clever ruse to make users do all the hard work.
Jay Adelson of Digg told MediaShift's Mark Glaser (who has a great summary of the whole story) that he'd never pay users:
"The way I would show my appreciation would be to never give them more power, more features than another user has. It might be something like a T-shirt, it might be a rating that they can show other users, but it has to be a level playing field.""
This particular tension between Digg and Netscape.com is clearly about rivalry, but does paying contributors break the tenets of Web 2.0?
Update: First time round on this post I managed to spell Jason's name wrong every time. Clearly it's time for a lie down.
