How To Digg One's Own Hole

As part of my gardening theme this week, I thought it most appropriate to explore Digg*. It's a relatively simple concept:

1. Sign up.
2. Submit web links.
3. Check out other submissions and vote on them ("Digg It" or "Bury It").
4. Follow the popularity of the links you, er, Dugg or submitted.
   
5. Feel really important as your links get promoted.
6. Cry as your links fall off the end of the rolling ticker, not having managed to set a throng of Web 2.0 denizens abuzz.
   

It's basically a beauty contest of regurgitated web content fluffed up by a community of will-never-bes (of which I proudly count myself as one), who sublimate their frustration at the mismatch between their achievements and their self-perceived authority by playing God with weblinks. The generic term for this, I believe, is a "mashup."

I prefer to think of it as a gigantic Web Hot Dog. A thousand parts of the pig - edible or not - blended into an unrecognizable pink paste, subjected to intense processing, and extruded into a friendly rounded shape for convenient consumption. Absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever, but surprisingly tasty and disturbingly addictive.

My own attempt at Digging, as you can tell from my paltry Dugg List, demonstrates patterns similar to voles in new territory, e.g. shallow holes scattered throughout cyberspace. It began with shameless self-promotion in the name of testing the waters. Sadly for me, only one other person Dugg my original vole post.

I then punted a New Scientist article which I honestly found intriguing. It had faultless spelling and NO apostrophe misuse to boot (something I only wish would catch fire in cyberspace). Obviously, only two other people and I value solid content and good grammar. Or, to gain more interest, should I say grammer?

In a quest to discover what people really like to see on the web, I placed my bet on a content-free but wildly entertaining link offering to tell me my typing speed. Clearly I was getting warmer.

Either lazy programming or a boundless sense of socialist optimism powers this site.

I resisted the urge to punish an informational pop-up dialog sporting a warning icon and the blatant lack of meritocracy. I figured that if this man managed to keep me on his website for an embarrassingly long period of time, typing chunks of the Gettysburg Address, I might as well spare a Digg for him.

My adventure came to a pause after I discovered a submission of a Slate writer's cautionary tale describing how he tried to experiment with Digg by promoting an article he wrote about Digg on Digg. Not only did I learn that my transgression of self-Digging could earn me a title of Hit Hog, but my head started spinning from the self-referential-ness of it all. People on Digg Digg themselves, Digg other Diggs, make friends with other Diggers (Digg my back and I'll Digg yours), Digg stories about Diggers writing about Digg. I had to sit down for a spell.

Is it democracy, or is it a collective ego-fest built on the shallow currency of clicks? I haven't really made up my mind yet, and until I do I may just keep lurking, making the odd crater here and there and becoming a hopelessly hooked Digg fiend. Mmmmm. Pass the mustard.

*It's yet another idea created by Time Travelling Dot Com Body Snatchers From 1999, whose foreheads are characteristically tattooed with big glassy pastel blue buttons labeled "Fund Me" in 12-point sans serif. Their hypnotic powers are such that people stop to stare and utter, "How are they making money?"