Digg This Plz
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Dear friends-who-own-blogs,
I know how you have all been inspired by the young-bloggers-who-earn-1000s-of-dollars that were showcased in the recent bloggers’ meetups, and I have been watching as all of you wiped the dust off your abandoned blogs and started new ones in parallel to maximize your chances of adsense revenue by generating lots and lots of content – content the world wants to read about – like hot chicks wearning linux tshirts, or how the iphone version 3.14.15 has revolutionized the world, or more hot chicks, but using macs this time. I have seen you grow up from SEO n00bs to social-media experts in a few weeks – experts who know just the right place and font-size for the Google adsense textboxes and how to write keyword-dense text. All that is great! I wish you a lot of success and wish that you generate lots and lots of content and your eCPM shoots through the roof etc. etc.
I added all of you to my messenger with the hope of having an intelligent conversation with you someday, but when I receive 5×30 = 150 messages to the tune of “Hey, plz Digg my post http://tinyurl.com/a-list “, it makes me want to rethink my decision of adding you to GTalk or MSN. I know your intentions are harmless, but my time is precious too; I realize that you just want your “10 things to do when you are bored” post to make the Digg FP (front-page, a word you have added to my vocabulary) and thereby increase your chances of getting 1000s of hits per day, hits that can translate to a few more dollars in ad revenue (after all, who doesn’t want to get rich quick?) and I can just ignore your messages and get on with my work, or block you, or appear offline – but things start getting ugly when your IMs turn into emails, and uglier still when the diggers cced in the emails add me on GTalk and tell me to let them know if “I need some Digg help”… adding my friends to my spam list is the last thing I want to do, so instead I am writing this post.
I will let you in on a secret. Whenever you send me a “Digg this please!” message instead of a “Read my insightful post on the important topic of XYZ and Digg if you like it”, it shows my place in your grand scheme of things very transparently, which is enough motivation for me to stop whatever unimportant thing I am doing at the moment, click your link, log on to my Digg account, and BURY your post.
So my dear diggers, now that you know my dirty little secret, please understand that I do not wish to play any role (however tiny) in your quest to be the next Boing-Boing. Please have some dignity and do something that you can proudly tell your grandchildren about. Of course, if you really write something original and worthwhile though, make sure to share it with me. I’ll Digg, Stumble, Reddit and Whatnotit out of my own free will if I like what you have to say, and if I want to share it with the world.
Signed,
Your Fan.
PS. Sorry about the title.
4:25 am
Interesting Post… Really!
5:39 am
LOL … A fitting reply indeed
11:11 am
Very Diggable!
you should have placed a Digg button
11:22 am
Err Salman, I hope you mean it as a compliment
If you really love irony, there is a tiny ‘Share This’ icon on the page, but that would be cruel 
11:28 am
it’s a compliment! and in fact I have digged it!
11:37 am
What’s happening to Green & White? :S
12:55 pm
Usama:
I now return you to our regularly scheduled broadcast.
1:37 pm
Lol finalllly someone steps up and says it – currently I’m just unfollowing or blocking or creating a gmail filter for anyone who’s sending me digg requests.
Way to go blogger meetups…. YAY for creating more noise in the world.
1:15 am
*Way to go blogger meetups…. YAY for creating more noise in the world.*
Humble Question: Why are you pissed at any initiative taken by other then you?
PS: I hope you dont take it personally, but this is one I usually get when reading a review by you.
1:17 am
one impression*
1:32 pm
Ammar – you’d have to understand the media industry for a while to know why.
I’ve been consulting with a number of people now on ways to increase authentic signals in new media. This “initiative” does the exact opposite by creating noise.
I’d love to debate the details of it but its pretty obvious to the consequence of creating noise on how much respect the “blogosphere” gets int he industry.
Instead of looking at this in such a narrow way – consider that we all need to work to establish blogs as a respectable and reliable source of news and info in order to push for blogger rights and compensation models which work from a local context.
This “initiative” just took several steps backward in that goal, and the only entity which benefits is google pakistan because its now scraping more dollars out of junk content.