You Diggin' Me, Slash(dot)?
No, this blog post isn't exclusively directed at a shaggy-haired former member of Guns N'Roses….
As you may have already noticed, the motivation for some of my past blog posts has come from writeups I've perused on other websites (which I dutifully link to and otherwise 'attaboy' within my essays). Some websites, in fact, are fundamentally aggregators of other websites' material; they generate little to no unique content of their own, but instead serve as a notification mechanism and subscribed community-based discussion portal for web-published writeups judged worthy of highlight. Two of the most popular of these sorts of sites are Digg and Slashdot; in the former case, the community votes on and therefore dynamically prioritizes submitted writeups (highest-rated material gets home page highlight), whereas Slashdot's moderators do the selecting themselves.
Regardless of the selection mechanism, sites like Digg and Slashdot are a great way to alert your peers to something that….oh, for example….I wrote….ahem….which you found to be of value. It's a great way to bring others into the debate (in the form of the blog post's comments) on a topic, regardless of whether or not you agree with my stance on it. And yes, my intentions aren't entirely altruistic….it's a great way to significantly ramp up the number of eyeballs peering at Brian's Brain. Which keeps my bosses happy, which keeps me employed, which keeps my wife (and the IRS) happy, yadda yadda yadda…..
We're working on adding 'Digg This' and 'Slashdot This' links to our blog posts, similar to what we already have in place for web versions of our print articles. Until those links go live, I'm going to start putting links like the ones below on the bottom of my blog posts (I hope you don't find that too irritating). But I'm not going to retrofit all 576 (!!!) of my already-published posts. So here's my early Christmas present request. If this writeup jogs your memory of something I've written in the past that was particularly awesome (or particularly horrible, for that matter) and you want to alert the world to it, could you submit it to Digg and/or Slashdot for me? Google and Zibb are great ways to find my already-published material (hint: putting 'Dipert' in as one of the search term criteria helps).
Between you and me, I strongly suspect that some bloggers self-submit their stuff to Digg and Slashdot (Shock! Amazement! Yeah, I know….). Modesty precludes me from following in their footsteps. But I'd very much appreciate your advocacy on my behalf.
