If you charge someone for something they can get for free elsewhere, a lot of people won't pay. That's the simple reality of it. You pay for a newspaper, sure, but would you, say, subscribe to The Wall Street Journal online, when you could just read blogs? Rupert Murdoch tried to make that happen, but now everyone who isn't him hates it.

Social-news site Digg, apparently in the hope of not needing people to describe it as a "social-news site" when talking about it, completely revamped its website last week. Since then its users have been in open revolt, going so far as gaming the site to steer Digg visitors to competitor Reddit. What's all the fuss about? We've distilled the drama into a graphical timeline.

A fellow named Peter Craig has secured the record for having the world's longest and active email address at 345 characters. Good on him, too — it's not just the gibberish it could have been.

Right now, the data you find on the Internet is more or less eternal. Sites come and go, sure, but traces remain, and as long as there's someplace to store information that information will persist. Maybe it shouldn't, according to a Dutch researcher, as if data degraded over time we'd more security and less piracy.