I just did something that gave me a moment of moral pause – I posted a link to Twitter to a Digg article that I myself submitted from the Crave blog. I wondered immediately after I did it that maybe I should have just linked directly to the Crave article itself — and I’m not even going to start wrapping my head around about how meta it is to twitter an article about Twitter.
Do you see the oddness in that? By using Digg as the way point, I might be taking initial traffic away from the Crave site, but with the hopes that eventually it will garner far more traffic in the long run (if, in fact, it gets dugg). It’s like web traffic gambling! Does this break blogging etiquette? Is there a set of unspoken linking rules? When I was on BOL, we would always try to credit both the original source article, as well as the proxy (Digg, Slashdot, Techmeme, etc). I guess if you credit as many sources as possible, there’s less of a chance that you’re upsetting someone along the way.
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23 Responses for "To link to Digg, or not?"
You may have a posting problem. There are support groups for this
And then what happens if I digg this blot entry??? Quick, someone call Brian Greene!
Hmm… Do you have the Crave RSS and Digg RSS feeding into your Jaiku? If so, I would simply Twitter the original piece. Don’t forget you can Post links to Facebook too!
well, someone had to do it.
http://digg.com/tech_news/To_link_to_Digg_or_not
That’s _very_ interesting. I think you made the right choice though, going through digg. You can really only win. People won’t click from twitter and just stop at digg, not clicking through to the crave blog. That’s pretty unlikely, since you’ve already got their interest.
I have been using Digg less and less lately, mostly because everything that I would find interesting on there comes first through Twitter, Pownce, or Google Reader.
There’s nothing wrong with linking to your Digg article, so long as you’re not one of those people who does that multiple times daily.
Although… the general Digg population isn’t all that bright, so you’re also choosing quantity of quality when you put focus on the article getting dugg before getting read.
Ricky is right. If it makes it to the front page, it’s going to get flooded with hits. It’s low-risk, high-reward, which is always the best.
2-1/2 hours in, and it has 53 diggs. A recent front page article took nearly 8 hours to make it. So, I think it’s in good shape.
The fault isn’t yours. If you look at the social network that the internet has created from 100 miles high, what do you see?
Twitter – you have a lot of people that follow you, and in the end you want to make people aware of this news. So what do you do? Post a link to where most people will see it which is…
Digg – the ‘center’ of the day’s most popular links. By posting to digg, you get both your fans to bump the link, and people on digg itself will see it and bump it. And where will it all link to?
Crave – the source. If you posted the link to crave on twitter directly, it’s possible that people on digg wouldn’t have seen it.
The weakest link in the chain are the people that will see the title on digg and do one of three things: ignore it, click the link, or get the jist of the article from the comments. In the end, you did the right thing, but it shows that there’s someting missing from the internet – the ability to both link to the digg article AND credit the source.
@Starman – Very well said. You hit the nail on the head there.
I think you did the right thing, the important thing is that the source gets credit. I have to agree with the sentiment on this post, if you are lucky you hit the jack-pot. otherwise, it does not get noticed if it is not dugg.
The truth is that I also pay less and less to Digg…
BTW – BOL is not the same with out you
, Tom can only do so much on his own, I miss your vibrant energy on the show. Gasp!!! Shock!!! I may unsubscribe…
I think the problem is that we’re all becoming too meta. I just dugg your blog post about a twitter about a digg about a blog post about twitter.
I don’t know what the solution is and I wonder where we’ll be 10 years from now. Either these kind of social services won’t exist, or we’ll have hundreds more options to choose from. My head hurts.
As long as you didn’t both create the content article and the digg, it’s all good.
Well, when I find a story on Digg, that I want to write about on my blog, I usually link to the Digg story, instead of the source which is linked to from Digg. I don’t see it as a problem since you don’t get the whole story on Digg, and therefore I don’t think that the original source will lose any traffic – not much anyway.
When we think about the way we do link, we first think Google and then ethic.
In your case neither Google nor the ethic would be against your decision.
It is interesting though how such an issue points to the fact that our values are wobbling more and more, losing the meaning of right and wrong.
If nothing else, your link reminded me of why I don’t go to Digg. the first ten or so comments were either pointless or off-topic. Meh. I’m all set with my RSS feeds.
There’s no such thing as “negative linking” so as long as you follow basic journalistic standards for sourcing and attribution, I wouldn’t worry so much about secondary and ancillary traffic pathing issues.
You do bring up good points and it really helps to illustrate why the HTTP_REFERER field exists in the protocol.
Digg should provide a link through service where you can paste a link to a digg page that auto forwards to the source but also displays a digg button to enable you to digg it if you like the article.
Actually they should do that for all submissions… I shouldn’t have to go back to the digg page to digg something I’ve just looked at.
Well it’s long been an issue, at least for me, that so many sites simply report what other sites are saying that other sites are saying that other sites are saying… clicking through four different sites to eventually see the originating article is tiresome.
yaya no posten, frauline.
Even though I’m in marketing and understand the potential traffic Digg can quickly bring, I usually think more long-term and link directly to the source. Content-scraping and middle-man sites, while always out there, have really blurred the situation in the last few years. Google (the masters of using links as a way to help discern a site’s importance) have even admitted it’s a constant battle to identify who’s the actual source when you have citations of citations of citations with varying levels of content-scraping all along the way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a Digg article come up ahead of the source article in the Google results because of all the inbound links pointing back to Digg (not to mention all the keyword-rich discussion that can take place in the comments.) That’s as much a Google issue as anything, but still. Long-term, Google’s usually one of the largest sources of traffic for most sites.
In the case of an influencer like yourself who obviously has a lot of people following what you do and who generally reports on more news-related items (and tech-oriented at that) I can definitely see the case for using Digg. But for the average joe out there I’d usually say link directly to the source. As Digg continues to grow, your odds of getting on the front page (for any section) continue to diminish.
So just last THUR we had a panel at Social Media Club Silicon Valley on Social News sites, where an interesting thought popped up I want to share here.
1 – I think you are ok doing what you did, how you did it. As I twittered recently, Social Media is about sharing media and starting conversation – you were merely signaling to different communities about a conversation you were interested in having, a piece of information that mattered to you enough to pass forward in the places in which you connect with others.
2 – On a deeper level, I realized the other night how much value Digg and other sites took away from the root of the conversation itself, from the Crave post in this example. There are 30 comments on the Digg page and only one on the Crave post itself. While it is true that the Digging of the article promotes the original content on the Crave site, how many people don’t bother to click over (as Starman mentioned above) So the people who went through the trouble to create the content are not getting the full value for their work – their seems to be some “link value leakage” here. The conversation is, in some sense, being siphoned from the creators…
The reality is there is little that can be done about this and probably should not be, but it is an interesting topic to discuss further.
PS – of course, the fact that conversation happens everywhere is natural, good and welcomed – it should not and can not be controlled – so please don’t beat me up for a point of discussion I am trying to raise
– in short, I’m just thinking out loud…
[...] Veronica Belmont » To link to Digg, or not? Interesting point I was just thinking about – whether Digg like sites are siphoning value from content creators – read to the end of this post to read my thoughts on this idea… (tags: digg comments conversation chrisheuercomment) [...]
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