Pass the popcorn and Digg in

I've got to admit that I've never been much of a believer in Digg, for pretty much the same reason that most people who aren't believers in Digg profess to not be believers in Digg. You know: narrow audience that tends to digg things that aren't actually news ("Check out this Easter egg I found when I hacked this back-end Linux gobbledegook!"), potential for rigging, etc. I'm still skeptical of its potential, the same way that I'm skeptical of "anti-Digg" news aggregation models like Daylife.

(For the record, I think Daylife is great, and I had great conversations with Jeff Jarvis and the Daylife guys at the Founders Club mixer last month, but my opinion is that all those experiments in next-generation news delivery should be taken for what they are -- experiments. Some will percolate to the top. Some won't. Some will change their models drastically and then succeed. We'll see.)

But back to Digg. I'm not going to tell you that my outlook on Digg changed completely, because it didn't (it only changed a little bit). But today marked the first occasion that I watched a post of mine climb from RSS-reader obscurity to the upper echelon of Digg's current Top 10 in Technology (the only Digg category that actually matters). To keep it brief, I posted about a funny video that I saw on the Wired blog Cult of Mac, which in turn had ironically been plucked from Digg. Considering its original source, I had not expected it to get Dugg at all, but lo and behold, someone gave it a boost early on. Then there were three Diggs, and five Diggs, and it hovered around a dozen for a while. I'm assuming that then a moderately popular blog must have linked to it, because over the next few hours it steadily rose into the 20s, and then it was around 30 when I logged off at the office.

Cue dinnertime: a nice healthy salad with goat cheese and beets, since I was still kind of full from this afternoon's impromptu peanut M&M festival in my cube. I'd picked up a magazine at random and read something that made me want to look something up regarding a Crave post, so I fired up Firefox and started sifting through posts when -- Crikey! There are 300 Diggs on that silly post about the Novell 'I'm a Mac' ad parody! So I clicked on the post's Digg link, and there were already five more Diggs than there had been on the previous page view. So I ate a bite of salad, and then hit reload again. Three more Diggs! By the time I'd finished dinner, it had crawled up into the current top 10 in the technology category.

It's blogedelic!

I should note that as an (almost) one-year veteran of tech journalism, I'm not a total stranger to Digg, nor am I unfamiliar with the bizarro-world feeling of having ridiculously dumb posts wind up with 1000+ Diggs (hello, pirate toaster). But watching the process? That's both cool, as well as a reminder that I should probably get a life.

Then, to top it all off, I found this great article on Digg concerning crowdsourcing. So much for my belief that you never found anything good there.

Oh, and this afternoon I was stricken with the Thursday Afternoon Distractedness Syndrome and took this picture of myself with the Photo Booth feature on my MBPro. That was my day. Not nearly as exciting as sipping cocktails at a Second Life demonstration at the Hotel on Rivington (that was last night) or snapping photos of innonate looking like a lush and a half at the Web 2.0 Meetup (that was Tuesday), but hey, we all need our quiet evenings.