Alt-This.com - your technology podcast

I’m pretty sure that everyone who likes technology and has an internet connection knows about the website digg.com. It was created by ex-TechTV dark tipper Kevin Rose (yeah, I know he hates that nickname, sorry Kevin!) and was created on the simple premise that giving control to the community would create a better tech news site.

Without a doubt digg took off like a rocket and has never looked back, with well over a half million registered users after just two short years on the web. The site is alive; users are posting, voting and commenting on stories left and right. The community has formed and digg is a huge part of the Internet landscape.

As a tech geek myself, I think I understand why digg.com works, it’s because the core demographic for the site just happens to be the core demographic that understands more about the internet than any other group. After the success of digg I always wondered if other sites in the digg style could thrive online. I figured that there are unlimited small niches that could be filled by smaller digg type sites, covering topics that would never even make a dent on the digg.com home page.

After running a little experiment, I’m beginning to believe that the “Digg Effect” may be unique to the digg demographic. Over the past decade I’ve worked with multiple country music artists on web sites, I’ve also written for and edited content on the Women of Country (http://www.womenofcountry.com) web site. I have watched country music fans post thousands of messages on bulletin boards and rave about their favorite artists. They are truly a rabid fan base, in a good way. They know what artists that they like and they want to help spread the word.

With my experience and knowledge on the basic country music fan, I thought it was a no-brainer that a site like digg.com but targeted specifically for country music fans would take off and take off quickly. I already had access to literally well over 50,000 country music fans per month between mailing lists and websites a month and figured that promoting the site to them would cause a viral marketing push and the site would be on it’s way.

I created the site Twangwire (http://www.twangwire.com) and put it up live on the web. Through the sites that we already had running and the mailing lists I put the word out there and the traffic began. For a new website, I can’t complain about the amount of visits the site was getting. It wasn’t long before there were over 100 unique visitors daily on a regular basis, but the interaction was nil. Nobody was signing up for an account. Nobody was posting stories. Nobody was commenting. Nobody was voting on the stories, even though an account wasn’t even needed to vote on them.

I’ve talked to a few people, both country fans and tech fans, who said the site is pretty straightforward and simple to grasp. I am really at a loss to explain it. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting digg type numbers, but I did at least expect to get some people signing up and interacting with the site. I fully expected to start small and watch the site grow little by little, but it seems that it stalled out of the gates. It’s got me thinking that there is a very specific demographic that this type of site can work with. Digg has the techies, and they seem to be the only group that understands that if everyone gives a little the end result is a great site for all to enjoy.

I thought for sure twangwire.com would take off, it was aimed at a rabid fan base that likes to promote their favorite artists and talk about the latest news and gossip. Maybe it will just take more time, as I am writing this article the site is only three months old, but the overall lack of interaction even though the traffic numbers are decent is very, very discouraging. People are starting to find the site, 1/3 of the people who visit are bookmarking the site according to my stats program, yet almost nobody is taking part in the site by signing up, voting, commenting and posting links.

I thought all of this was kind of interesting so I thought I’d share my experiences in case anyone else out there is looking to launch a digg type site. The software I’m using for the site is open source, it’s called Pligg and it’s available at http://www.pligg.com. It’s a great little package, but I return to my theory here that a site like this, right now, would only work in tech circles. There’s a place on the pligg message boards where people can post their site links. I looked at a bunch of them, and all of them really seem to fall into the same category that my site is in. Little or no interaction. It’s so bad that there are mods for the program to fake votes and make a site look like it’s “live” but to what end I don’t know. A site either makes it or it doesn’t, I don’t think faking the numbers will convince a bunch of real people that they need to sign up and take part.

I take my hats off to Kevin Rose and all the folks over at digg who have created one hell of a website. It was obviously the right concept with the right demographic at the right time. Hopefully at some point groups besides the hard core geek will be able to take a site like digg and help it grow. Right now, however, I don’t believe the digg model is ready for the average country music fan or the regular Joe. Hopefully somewhere down the road that will change.