Like many bloggers, I game the social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit by posting my own stories with provocative headlines.  Slow afternoon; slap together something and call it Web 2.0 Is So Totally Over and you’ll pick up an extra 2,000 hits over next 30 minutes or so. 

This is an ultimately self-defeating exercise–most of the people who click through from one of the popular services aren’t really interested in enterprise software, don’t “digg” the article, and never come back unless I sucker them in again with another sexy come-on.  The right way to build an audience for this sort of web site is to slowly over time develop a loyal following among people who are interested in the topic and visit every day.  I’ve done that over the past couple of years with my contemporary classical music site Sequenza21 which is usually third on the Technorati rankings of classical music sites, gets decent traffic, lots of participation through comments, and has ”authority” in terms of links.  Nearly ninety percent of the visitors are regulars.

That’s my ambition for this blog but sometimes I can’t resist taking a quick run at the cheap numbers.  And, entre nous, I suspect that my needy grab for attention is not only common but is petty larceny compared to some of the gamemanship that may be going on behind the scenes at some of the big bookmarking sites.

I’m not accusing anybody of cheating, mind you, but consider this:  the most “Dugg” article this week is something labeled An old hi-resolution colour photograph of London - circa 1930’s?.  This is exactly what it says it is–an perfectly ordinary old hi-resolution colour photograph of London - circa 1930s that appears in a Wikipedia entry.  Posted by xoe26, a person with only 30 previous posts, this rather nice but unremarkable old street scene picture has gotten (at last glance) 4237 “diggs.”  How can this fascination with something so ordinary be explained?  Two potential explanations; there’s some kind of rigdom in the kingdom of diggdom or crowds are not nearly as wise as some people think.  Either explanation suggests all sorts of weakness and potential abuses in the social bookmarking/collective intelligence model.

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