Take More Risks

You might have noticed that the “Digg This” graphic, generated by Aviran’s Digg This Wordpress Plugin has started appearing in some of my posts. It’s quite a handy tool as it automatically detects when a story appears on the Digg website by tracking the referrer URL and then displays the button if it notices it’s from digg.

I’ve been reading a few stories throughout the week namely the It’s the Content, not the Icons story over in 37 signals which argues against using social bookmarking icons in general. It’s certainly provided food for thought….

Obviously buttons and icons can only go so far in helping something win more votes. I suppose they’d work well with if you already have a large readership and something of a Digg culture on your blog. It undeniably provides a shortcut for loyal subscribers to Digg your post. However if it’s the first thing a person sees in your post, they’ll immediately question your motives for placing it there.

I think it might be better to place Digg text link requests that appear organically within paragraphs from now on. When I’ve applied this before in other markets - conversation rates have soared.

Besides the Digg This button appears to be incompatible with Internet Explorer 7. This isn’t as much of an issue as it would normally be in non-techie circles since a large proportion of my audience use Firefox. It’s still a worry though. I think I’ll keep it for the time being but remove it from the start of posts. After all if people want to digg a story, they’ll do it on the site once they’ve finished reading it the post.

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