InDiggNation: Digg, Dugg, DiggF*cked and OCDD...

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"Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning." -- George Carlin


Mind you, I like Digg. The whole concept makes a lot of sense - let the popularity of a submitted news item determine it's rank on the news site. I've put stuff in there and its gotten Digged.

Or should that be, It got Dugg? Anyway, I can Digg it. The site itself has a lot of good features (some of the comments on items are hilarious) but it also represents its own "UnDigging" if you will.

The problem is, you have a lot of 20 - something hot -shot script kiddies putting up junk that really isn't newsworthy at all. Here's an example (very recent):



All of the above are really mediocre, mostly uninformative, and for the most part generally represent people's efforts at "mental masturbation" - but they still made it to the front page of Digg. I tell you, this is just not diggnified.

There's also some Digg Fraud going on where people get together and Digg something up to the top in order to encourage traffic which can result in DiggF*cking - the process of creating so much traffic to a site that it is brought down.

Don't get me wrong, traffic to your site is good. But it's not good when a whole week's worth of it is concentrated into a single 20 minute blast filled with mostly curiosity - seekers!

Yes there is good stuff on there - but you still have to filter it out. Judging from the number of comments on some of these entries, I can see that OCDD (Obsessive-Compulsive Digg Disorder) has set in with some of these anonymous internet nerds looking for attention from their top-secret fritos-strewn batcaves in the basement of the science building --whose sole life consists of living in the online world of Digg. Do they work for a living? If so, I wonder if they actually ever get anything done?

Well, that's my take on it. Digg ya later -- I have to go back to Digg.com and see if there's any good new "stuff". Beats washing your hands 100 times a day, anyway.





Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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