The controversy over the removal of a new DVD encryption key from Digg is the perfect story for the new social media. The geeky readers of the popular tech news site are fanatics in the cause of free information; for this web generation, as a whole, heavy-handed enforcement of copyright protection by big media companies is the one issue that arouses passion on level of the 1968 opposition to the Vietnam War. But there's one more reason the Digg controversy — which forced a climb-down by Kevin Rose, founder of the social news site — has generated such an epic flood of commentary on the blogs. There's nothing that the media loves as much as the contemplation of its own navel. That's true for traditional newspapers, which cover eachother out of all proportion to the interest of readers. And it's true on the web, for stories on the death threats against the online marketing guru, Kathy Sierra, for example — or a revolt by users of a social media site. Unfortunately, these are also the topics that will restrict social news sites such as Digg and Techmeme to a geek ghetto; the general public really doesn't care that much.