Are we cool enough for DIGG?

[Pat Coyle]

DIGG founder, Kevin Rose, is featured in this month's INC Magazine. Reading the story about his DIGG Nation caused us to wonder is there any way for Smaller Indiana to work with (or imitate) DIGG so that we can vote up our own favorite news?

What can we learn from this new media enterprise?
Digg has a loyal and enthusiastic following. It holds regular "off line" meetups. It has its own Webcast. It even has T-shirts!! Do you think Smaller Indiana can become a new media entity similar to this? Share your thoughts here.

[Stephen James]

I hope not. Did you see the Digg comments on the Fast Company article, Women in Web 2.0?

I'm not surprised. The Internets are full of 18-30-males-living-in-their-parents-basement stereotypes. I've never watched DiggNation, but from what I've heard via TWiT, I doubt it's my crowd.

I hope SmIN doesn't become an engine to game with top ten lists for the following:
A Spider has Gone Missing on the Space Station
Its a face, no its a bank, no... wait WTF?
Sugar Frosted Cereal Museum (Photos)
Every man's dream girl / assassin
Inmate gets $300,000 for lost genitals
Pot Cookie Monster

I could go on. . .

[Amy Stark]

Yes.. SI could be the next Digg. It might even be a mandate. You are directly linked to a very deep talent-pool which is necessary to pull it off. The technology and the infrastructure are vital because you don't want a twitter-like fail whale following you around.

Beyond the technology and infrastructure-- which you have covered--using this thriving social media platform would be fabulous PR for our great state.

Has anyone seen the HBO special about Anderson, IN? Wow...

[Colin Clark]

Is there a way to make it so there are 'digg this' buttons on every SI post (stumbled and delicious too for that matter). That would be a great first step. There are so many users on SI that log on regularly, but there's no way for us to instantly syndicate content to our favorite bookmarking sites. It would be interesting to see the impact we could have.

[Kyle Lacy]

This is a great idea. I would love something like this developed in Smaller INdiana!

[Matt Wohlstadter]

I don't see why not. It's a great idea to get the college crowd more involved in Indianapolis that are involved in technology - new media. It would be a great way to get the collective thought in Indianapolis on how they would feel about a certain issue.

[Kyle Lacy]

It is hard to get the college crowd involved in new media other than Facebook. If we could figure out a way to get a younger demographic on here (our age) it would be that much better!

[Don Schindler]

If you wanted to be Digg then you picked the wrong platform. There's really no way to vote things up to the top of SI. I don't think Ning has a widget for this yet.

Right now, Pat, you select what you want us to talk about. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

If you really want to leverage the community then there should be a way to organize this community, quickly and efficiently, to help each other out. But instead of having to go places and review things like we do now (films, blogging etc...) which take a lot of time, I would make it more standard and quick to do.

Like, say, I have a website that just launched for a client and I want a lot of inbound links from trusted sources (i.e. friends from Smaller Indiana that control their own websites) and I want people to help me push an article of the recent launch on other platforms like Twitter or Facebook. In other words, link to me and talk about me briefly during the launch so I can get the search engines to find me.

I also believe we can help each other along with open-source ideas and training on different strategies and tactics with technology.

What do you all think?

[Erik Deckers]

I think the best way for us to implement a Digg-like system is for all of us to send email after email to Pat lobbying -- or "digging" -- for the articles and blog posts we want him to put up there. His email address is pat@--ADDRESS DELETED BY SITE OWNER.

Actually, I wouldn't put it past Doug Karr's capabilities to create a Digg-type widget that would allow people to vote for the best blogs and articles. Those that receive the most votes appear at the top of the widget for a time.

Or maybe a "best blog post" type of voting system that people can vote on for each week. Every Monday brings a new champion and starts a new round of voting.

[Don Schindler]

I like this idea, Eric.

[Amy Stark]

LOL to "pat@--ADDRESS DELETED BY SITE OWNER."

Isn't there already a way for Pat to track this manually? How many clicks per blog or forum post? Remember from Groundswell there are a lot of readers compared to contributors, so it would have to be a different metric than number of responses. I wonder if the passive readers would be willing to click a widget to raise or lower a blog ranking, even though they don't want to write a response.

Seems to me a widget could be whipped up that calculates this automatically and puts the winner on top. Hey Doug Karr... you have some spare time don't you? =)

Just some brainstorming thoughts.

[Pat Coyle]

If we put Digg links inside SI, would we pull back a feed from Digg that only served the articles we have ranked? Or would we need to build this ourselves?

I'm not wanting to have a DIGG culture (like the one Stephen describes). I'm simply thinking we could emulated some of the dynamics of Digg's community...video content, meetups, etc. I also think it would be great if we could share with eachother the stuff we find and like out there on the Web...even beyoned the content we create here.

Thanks everyone for the replies...let's keep this thread alive with more ideas...

[Stephen James]

@Pat By using the word "cool," I thought you were referring to the culture of Digg.