Digg competitor Mixx just launched an extension to its groups feature that founder Chris McGill describes as “Ning for social media”.

Users can now set up Mixx community sites on their own subdomains (see ours here). Administrators have the power to brand them visually, post editorial content, and even make some revenue off advertisements. Others can join as members and begin submitting items as they would regularly on Mixx. All submissions (stories, images, and videos) can be made just to a particular community, or to the Mixx site as a whole as well.

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Adobe recently released a beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 on the Adobe Labs website. The software is available for both Windows and the new Mactel platform.

While Photoshop CS3 is free to download, there’s a small catch - you must have a valid serial number of Photoshop CS2 to activate Photoshop CS3 beta else the software will expire after the two day grace period.

Coming back to Digg, this site is inhabited by a large population of Adobe Photoshop fans and actual users. Some previous stories related to Photoshop have been dugg by as many as 5000 members.

The rule is simple - if you can write any good tutorial on using Photoshop, the likelihood of hitting the Digg front page is very high.

No wonder when Adobe announced Photoshop CS3, the news of the software release, Photoshop CS3 Screenshots story and even the download page hit the Digg front pages immediately.

Digg could be a good place for Adobe to advertise their products but there is a slightly worrying phenomenon as well.

A Digg member posted a link that had easy instructions on how to bypass activation of Photoshop CS3 by changing certain Hex values. The link has received ~800 diggs at the time of writing this story.

Unlike the general Digg crowd behavior, most comments here are very polite like “smooth and sexy”, “wow… thanx patch worked perfect! ” - people are happily discussing and sharing their opinions about the Photoshop CS3 patch.

It can be assumed that most of these ~900 Digg members are using pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop CS2 on their machines. And that’s not all, the crack is just meant for the Mac version of the software, all hell will break loose when someone posts a Windows patch for Photoshop CS3 on Digg.

Strong signals that the pirated to legit user ratio is really very high at Digg. Is Digg any different from Pirate Bay and other warez sites ?

Probably not since Digg is also promoting software piracy by allowing threads that discuss methods to crack software. It maybe time for Digg moderators to step in.

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