So I woke up this morning and checked my university email only to find a new message with the subject of How to use "DIgg It" website. Hoping that I wasn't receiving digg spam from my university, I opened the email to find the following.
Below that message was a forwarded message with the "Explicit instructions to create a Digg account"TO: All Peace Studies Students, Friends of Peace Studies, and Other interested individuals
Dr. Scott ----, our colleague from the Peace and Emergency Action Coalition for Earth (P.E.A.C.E.) has asked us to complete the exercise delineated below in order that we may use the Digg website to garner support to complete the software package of our "Sustainable Peace and Development Program (SPDP). Please start with item number 1 below, titled "Explicit instructions to create a Digg account are...." Then, please follow the remaining steps to completion.
This effort is VERY important. Dr. ----- has established an international network of colleges, universities and other groups which will develop "Peace Room" data bases on innumerable topics relating to sustainable peace and development. ) As you know, we now have a "Peace Room" located in the basement of ------ Hall). As a former U.S. Naval intelligence officer, Dr. -------- is applying Pentagon War Room research methods to the quest for WORLD PEACE (thus the name Peace Rooms).
It is impossible to totally describe this very vital effort in an e-mail, however, if you have additional questions, either e-mail me at -------@---------- or call me at ------------.
Once again, I stress the importance of this mission, and how important it is for you to lend your assistance.
Yours for Peace and Survival,Bill - ------------
In any case, it's complete crap that my university is sending me emails which expects me to create a user account to game digg. So let's burry the story instead and show them how digg really works. Not to mention the site linked from the story looks like it was created in the 90s... it's just missing some animated gifs.
By "refresh", I mean to get the page again. In both Firefox and Internet Explorer, this is done by hitting F5. The browser will simply update the page with fresh data from the server that serves up the page.
1. Explicit instructions to create a digg account are:a. Go to www.digg.com
b. Click on "Join Digg" near the top of the page, to the right of the Digg logo.
c. Fill in the information requested on the page that comes up. As for gender, recognize that this is Digg's sense of humor. But the "Are you a human" question is not a joke... you have to identify the weird characters in the box (called a captcha) to prove that you are a human being, and not some hacker who has written a program that goes to digg.com and creates a million fraudulent accounts. The point is that recognizing those letters is easy for a human being, but very difficult for an automated program. Such is the world we live in.
d. After that is completed, the site informs you that it has sent an email to the address you provided. Go open that email. In it, there is a link to click on, which confirms that you are indeed the owner of that email address, and that you spelled it correctly.
e. Clicking on the link brings you to step 3 of the process, where we can link to all our associates on other social networking sites. This is unnecessary and can be skipped by clicking on “No thanks. I'll do this later.", which we won't.
f. A page should come up, proclaiming victory. We're done. If they immediately go to
http://digg.com/software/Software_for_Sustainable_Peace_and_Development
they can now click on "Digg it!".
2. The end product is this: If we can get our article about CSPD off of the "Upcoming" list, and on to the "Popular" list, all of the thousands of people will see our article and learn about our software project. The way Digg works is that any article displayed submitted to Digg is "judged" by Digg's readership, which now hopefully includes us. The more people that click on "Digg It!" for an article, the closer that article will get to the top of the list of stories that Digg presents. The closer to the top, the more people see it. It's a Darwinian process. The "So What" is that Digg's readership are all smart, curious, geeky people who are all interested in technology, politics, and a bunch of other things. So, if you too are smart, curious, and geeky, what Digg gives you is news and articles highly likely to be of interest to you because they've been judged interesting by probably hundreds of thousands of like-minded individuals from all over the world. This is PRECISELY the kind of people we need seeing our article, right?
Note that in the article that we submitted is essentially a link to the intro placed on the peaceroom site, which also contains an invitation to the software project and link to the project's home page on sourceforge.net
Cliff notes:
My university sends me an email to create a digg user account and digg a story about some peace bullshit (I took a Peace Studies course last semester, they must have farmed everyone's email who did). Instead of Digging the story, I want us to Burry this story. Link to the story: http://digg.com/software/Software_for_Sustainable_Peace_and_Development
Formatted Link
No comments:
Post a Comment