From Our Staff | September 09, 2007

As you peruse our blog these days, you might notice some new icons lurking at the bottom of the posts. We’ve added automated links for three popular social bookmarking sites: Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. If you’ve haven’t paid much attention to the world of social bookmarking, it’s an interesting phenomenon and worth getting involved with. As with all of these “democratic” content-ranking systems, every online community is only as good as the degree of participation of its members.

The literary community, it seems to me, needs to step up in this regard. For example, if you would like to submit one of our posts or stories to Digg, you may well find yourself in a bit of a conundrum when asked to select a category. Digg does not yet have “Fiction” or “Poetry” categories. It doesn’t have a “Literature” category. It doesn’t even have a “Books” category. In fact, it doesn’t have an “Arts” category at all. Heck, if they just gave us an “Other” I’d feel we could work with that. But under “Entertainment,” you have the four diverse choices of “Celebrity,” “Movies,” “Music,” and “Television.” Of course, Digg provides separate categories for each of the major console gaming systems.

The best vector for change is active participation. There isn’t a Fine Arts category in part because there isn’t enough apparent demand for it. We can show that demand by submitting arts and literature stories more and more to services such as Digg. Let your digital voice be heard!

–Patrick