The intention was to cut down on spammy stuff created by content farms or scraped and repasted by SEO sites. 

It was big news because it coincided with the IPO of content farm king Demand Media, who specifically singled out changes to Google search as a threat to their company's bottom line. 

Today the change went into effect. In a blog post Cutts singled out Jeff Atwood and the folks at Stack Overflow for their help. 

Interestingly, this post clarified who the change will effect most. "The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content," wrote Cutts. 

That makes it seem like sites that repost aggregate content will be affected more than content farms like Demand Media which produce original, if low quality content. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper