I Dig Digg, Dig?

Discovering Web 2-Point-Oh 101: A Grey-beard’s Adventure in On-line Marketing

I Dig Digg, Dig?

How does a blogger float to the top of the pile? I mean, if you want bad writing, bad poetry, bad-almost-anything, you’ll find it in the blogosphere. But there’s good stuff there out, too, and you want to know about it - or at least I want to know about it.

This is one of the things that’s been bothering me for ages - so it was good when my geek friend Taliesin invited me out for coffee (hadn’t seen him in eight years - he’d disappeared to Taiwan, where he’s teaching, and he was in town for a holiday this week).

Somehow the conversation turned to blogging - it always does with me - and that’s when he explained the concept of Digg.

I dug it immediately so I went home and Dugg my own blogs, you dig?

And I dug the site from the word go, too, because, for once in my chaotic life, I decided to read the instructions (I know, I know, but it was a moment in which I was in touch with my feminine side) - so I took the tour.

Digg, I learned, is a place where people share links to stuff they find interesting on the web. “Every article submitted to Digg has a count of how many Diggs the story has received. You need to be signed in to Digg a story. For every registered user that clicks ‘Digg it’ the count goes up one. If a story reaches the tipping point, then it gets promoted to the homepage,” said the friendly guide (ok, it wasn’t an actual, you know, tour guide - but virtual is everything these days).

So ‘Superman is a Republican and Batman is a Democrat’ had 89 Diggs when I visited the homepage this morning (excuse me - who cares? Well, it seems that 89 people + the writer do. Wierdos). And 424 had Dugg ‘The 5 Most Embarrassing Moments of Nintendo’s E3 Conference’ (much more interesting: “It’s easy to just forget this year’s Nintendo conference, pretend it never happened, or ignore it entirely. That won’t change the fact that by and large, it was a miserable trainwreck of failure and easily the company’s worst in history. What went wrong? Oh, about a thousand things, really, but nobody has time to relive it. So here’s the run down.” Now THAT might be somethin’ worth readin,!)).

Sadly for us in tourism, though, ‘12 Best Hotels for an Affair’ had only 291 Diggs, but I suppose that’s understandable…

But Digg is divided into categories, of course, so it you click on Travel & Places, where you can read the site as it is or instruct it to list the top Diggs over the last 24 hours, 7 days, 1 month or 1 year - and where you’ll learn that ‘Consumerism in New York’ (an image on Flickr) received 795 Diggs, and an article about a vegan strip joint (no, really) called Casa Diabolo managed 604.

Trouble is, of course, that I couldn’t find my own article - Comment on the Tourism Sector’s BEE Codes - although I’d already Dugg it (but I suppose one Digg doesn’t make a summer). You could change this, though - after you’ve signed up on Digg, go to my site and the article , then click on the ‘Bookmark’ link at the bottom of my article - and choose ‘Digg’ from the pop-up list.

More than 6,000 of you read our weekly On Line Travel Focus newsletters - and once every one of you has followed my suggestion, Comment on the Tourism Sector’s BEE Codes will have risen to the top of the heap.

Imagine…

Digg isn’t the only site of its kind, I’m sure, but it’s the first I’ve played with. And that’s the amazing thing about Web 2-Point-Oh - there’s always something new… even for a greybeard to discover.

Talk To Me - Martin Hatchuel - martin@thistourismweek.co.za or leave your comments below for everyone to see.