Regular readers and close associates will know that I’m a bit of a blog purist. I don’t like the bluryness between genuine, unbiased conversation and marketing hype — particuarlly around word-of-mouth reccomendaiton.
I also don’t like people wanting to tone down ‘uncivil’ aspects of the blogosphere either.
But something that has recently got my goat is people putting links on their blogs posts for the readers to Digg their post.
An example of this can be seen on the latest post from No Soap, Radio – the otherwise really cool people behind 30 Boxes (new, also cool, online caladenda app). It’s an admitidly subtle “Digg It”, albeit in bold, link.
Maybe I’m just being a style nazi, but I find the blatent goading like this to be really vulgar.
And don’t even get me started on Socialable – a plugin for WordPress which adds iconic links to entice not only being ‘dugg’ but also get added to del.icio.us, Furl, Yahoo My Web, Reddit and more.
I see people upset about this a lot.
I personally have a del.icio.us url and a digg url. It’d be great if someone thinks my posts should be seen by everyone. It’s huge to have a post dugg by loads of people, validation of your efforts.
BUT… blog readers are generally lazy and more often than not, only lurk.
Countering my own argument, you’ll get recognition when you get it.
But your let something so little be so annoying.
I don’t know Ben. In the same way you got Email this in your RSS feeds, its not that removed from having add to del.icio.us or digg this too.
Hmmm you make an interesting point Ian.
My thought on that has always been that email is a private one-to-one reccomendation. A ‘Digg It’ link is about getting wide-spread publicity.
But actually my argument doesn’t stand up enough, so I’ve decided to remove the ’email it’ link.
blogging facilitates the most unpleasant aspect of all our characters… our ego.
That you for being so… subtle, James.
Once upon a time sites had “Don’t forget to bookmark this page!” or “Make this your homepage” links. I remember not being impressed by them then, either; if you didn’t know how to set a page as your homepage you should figure it out. Similarly, if you want to Digg it! then you’re probably smart enough to have installed a bookmarklet.
The interesting thing, I suppose, is how geeks that would have joined with me in sneering at the ’99 dotcom idiocy of assuming being a homepage was a good thing will now pimp their site for a day’s surge in traffic. Sad really.