I like your rules. I have been ignoring requests for votes more and more…. hopefully one day I will be as strong as you and be able to say no to all the crap that is sent to me!

Hi Paula! In fairness, a lot of what gets sent to me isn’t crap, but merely stuff that isn’t core to what I write about, or what I’m interested in.

We’ve only got so many hours in the day! So I have to be disciplined in my reading habits…

Crap was a strong word… not all that I get is crap, just that if I wouldn’t read it on my own anyhow, I find that it is getting in my way!

All good points Wayne. I think you strike at the heart of two goals of recommendation sites.

1) For site owners/marketers: Promote quality sites to interested users to gain more traffic and sell product, services or whatever.

2) For readers: to share high quality sites with like-minded readers who would like to read the material.

What many marketers forget is that this isn’t just a numbers game. If I get 5,000 of my nearest and dearest to Stumble my site on organic farming it will probably bring more traffic, but it will be traffic with a high bounce rate. If I’m selling parsley seeds it doesn’t matter if I get 5,000 or 5 million visitors. What matters is that I get enough visitors who want to buy parsley seeds for me to make a profit. We have to target our audience.

Likewise our audience may go to the front page of Digg to see what’s hot, but they’ll only click on the things of interest. Similarly they’ll follow your Diggs and Stumbles to find things on topics that they like that you have a habit of sharing.

It’s pretty basic marketing, but people seem to forget it. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are great for marketers and readers because they have the ability to serve both goals, to match people to the material they are interested in.

But if we all Stumbled or Dugg everything that came our way, we’d be sifting through the same detritus we did before. The sorting mechanism would be gone, and from a marketing perspective it would be about as effective as me advertising my parsley seeds during a World Wide Wrestling Federation match-up. Lots of people would see the ad, but really how many would care?

Hi there Heidi!

That’s a good justification / explanation of what I’m trying to achieve.

It’s a shame that some people I’ve had friend me have done so thinking I’m just some kind of vote for hire.

When I explain that’s not how it works, they quickly unfriend me and then move on.

Which is a shame.

BTW, for some reason, your comment ended up being eaten by Akismet. I think the mention of Parsley tipped things…

Nice article Wayne and I’m obviously with you on this one. Blind voting leads social media down a popularity contest path, and I believe detracts from its purpose of revealing great content. And of course, as you point out it just creates more noise.

Yeah, thankfully, we’re not that rare a breed, you & I!

BTW, I’ve edited your URL to the article I commented on. That way, we’ve got a dialogue in place.

Speak soon, fella!