I usually like Mike Arrington's posts, but yesterday, he fell into a classic forest/trees trap with the Digg imbroglio:

But my bigger problem is that Wired isn’t simply reporting news about Digg. They’re making the news. And they’re going negative. In the first example, they make a prediction that Digg will fall, comparing it to Friendster. No news was reported - it was just an out of the blue roundhouse punch at Digg. In the second example the reporter actually creates the story she writes about, and willfully violated the Digg terms of use in the process. And this was done for commercial gain - the Wired story describing this has received a ton of traffic (and is actually the number 1 story on Digg right now).

This is in reference to Annalee Newitz' "let's try to game Digg - yep, it can be gamed" experiment. Arrington attacks Wired for going after Digg and creating news. I have news of my own for Mike: Annalee simply publicized something that's happening - and that is news. Calling her reporting invalid because Wired's parent company also owns Reddit is willfully starting at the trees, all the while ignoring the forest.

Digg is being gamed massively in the political sphere (see Charles Johnson's site for info on that - and no, I'm not commenting on his, or anyone else's politics here). Politics attracts crowds, but I'd bet good money that Digg is being gamed in other areas, too.

Bottom line: you can push your head into the sand, like Arrington, and decide to ignore the problem based on who's talking about it. Or - you could actually pay attention to the problem itself.