Personally, I can’t tell 128k AAC files apart from the originals. I had a hunch that most other people can’t either, but I decided to write up an informal listening test to find out. To make sure I got a lot of responses, I put it up on Digg . Well, hundreds of gigs of transfer and ten of thousands of votes later the results are in: turns out most people can’t tell.

This was an interesting experiment for me. Not so much because of the music results. I know that 128k AAC is pretty good, and I knew that before. It’s interesting to see an application that I built weather a number one spot in the Digg top 10. Rails managed to serve up hundreds of page requests a second without a hiccup. Of course, it was a very simple app. There weren’t many database calls and I wasn’t serving up any images, but it was also hosted on my home box and remained as speedy as ever the entire time. Amazon’s great S3 service was also a joy to use and obviously took the brunt of the onslaught.

Even so, I think that’s the last time I’ll do anything like that. I had no idea the kind of bandwidth Digg users could suck down if given half the chance!

Here’s a little spam tip guys: when the ENTIRE TEXT of a message is a link, it’s spam. And when a profile signs up and immediately requests to be friends with 4000 accounts, it’s a spam bot. I realize that you guys are busy trying to turn all the ColdFusion that Tom wrote back in his mom’s basement into .NET, but can you at least try to remove the obvious stuff? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it used to be fun to go to the spam bot pages and see all the kids desperate enough to believe that the hot, half-naked chick they’ve never seen before wants to be their friend, but it’s starting to wear a little thin.