The Honest Way

A great phrase from the late 1960s brought right up to the present! Yep, I was around back then which is no big deal except that when I think to my past, we did very well without the internet or even computers come to think of it, let alone mobile phones, portable personal stereo - and not even any kind of stereo!

What has that got to do with Web2.0? Well, quite a bit in a roundabout way. Good tune by Yes, by the way (you had to be there…).

Web 2.0 is all about social networking, if you didn’t already know that or have been living in a 1960s hippy commune that still hasn’t got electricity… Social networking online, to be more specific. In the 1960s, we didn’t have “online” so all our social networking was done face to face. We wrote down each other’s home phone numbers on bits of paper with an implement called a pen… and we got to know each other in social places like pubs, bars, clubs - anywhere people interacted socially.

Of course, our social networks back then were a lot smaller than can be created online today, but they were personal and we made what is known as friends - the real live kind who we could talk to face to face and get to know and be comfortable with.

Online, that idea of making friends is quite removed from the true social interaction of people in a physical sense. Sure, we have lots of contacts - sometimes they can be in the hundreds or even thousands, but how many of them would you invite around for dinner?

Ok, enough thinly disguised disdain for electronic friendship - lets get on to what this post is meant to be about. Social Networking, social bookmarking etc are terms generated and popularised by the Web 2.0 evolution and encompasses many different websites set up for the purpose of people interacting online with lots of other people.

One of these sites is Digg. I bet you wondered when I’d get around to that. Digg is a place that you can show off your literary genius to the rest of the web by posting the title and a short description of your latest article or story. You simply sign up for a free account, post your article’s details and then it sits on the database where other members can see it. If the title gets their attention they’ll click on it and read your article. If they like it, they may well bookmark your site and come back to read more of what you’ve written (or will write in the near future). If it’s very short and badly written or worthless junk, they can mark it as such and you’ll get a negative response to your site and may even get labeled as a spammer.

So it pays to only digg quality articles.

Another thing worth noting is that any links you add to your short description when you digg your story are marked as nofollow, so there’s no way to gain back-links from there. Use Digg purely as a way to get your story, article or blog post out to the world in order to drive traffic to your site and improve your self-awareness and self branding on the web.

Oh, and if you liked this article, I have a nice big Digg icon that you can click…hint, hint…

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY