Everyone is bashing Yahoo today for starting a digg-style site. I experienced the same digg-mob behavior when I re-started Netscape as a social new site.

Let me point out a couple of things:

1. Kevin Rose did not create the concept of voting.
2. Kevin Rose DID copy the idea for digg from our friend Josh at delicious.com and has been very public about that. [ Note: I sad copy, not "stole.]”
3. No one “owns” the idea of social bookmarking or social news, and if someone does it’s Slashdot who really started the concept 10 years ago.
4. The “digg mob” is bunch of 12-year old kids–it’s best to ignore them.

The whole concept of our industry is to build off of what came before you.

• delicious built a better shared bookmarking system than furl.net.
• Kevin Rose added a better design to delicious.com.
• My team at Netscape added editorial systems, payment, video uploads, tags, and sitemail to digg/delicious.
• The team at reddit added personalization to delicious/digg, and now digg is going to taking personalization and incorporate it into their product.

Back in the Netscape days I told Kevin and Jay to stop saying I “stole” their idea and they did. It’s just immature and stupid to believe that anyone EVOLVING a concept is stealing. Grow up people.