Off the Top of My Head

I Really Hate Webmasters Sometimes (The Digg Phenomena)

As you may have seen from comments in the previous entries, we were recently featured on a site called Digg. This is a site where anyone can submit a link to an article or blog entry which they particularly liked and then other users may give it a vote of confidence (or digg it). If you receive a certain amount of diggs, your article will then move up the listings. In our case, so many people dugg our article that it landed us right on the front page. This brought around 20,000 unique visitors which is great exposure for this blog. The down side is it also sparked comments from those I will just refer to as “Webmaster Playa Haters”. I am using this entry to look at some of those comments which range from ill informed to downright anal.

The first and most common was that in a post which highlighted the need for good grammar when talking to Google, I had in fact used the improper word by going with enquire rather then inquire. The truth is both are right and depend much on where in the world you are. I am a European and therefore tend to use enquire which is absolutely correct. Despite this fact, I was treated to various comments making fun of me. Low and behold those in question quickly removed them when they realized they were wrong. Heres a bit of an explanation for those who still think Inquire was right and Enquire was wrong:

This one’s particularly awkward, for both these reasons. The Latin origin is the verb inquirere (based on quaerere, to ask or seek, which is also the source of query). However, the first examples of the English verb—in the thirteenth century—began with en-, or even sometimes an-. This is because the prefix became changed in its passage into English; it arrived via Old French, in which the word was enquerre (modern French has enquérir). Educated people in the fifteenth century began to be persuaded under the influence of Latin that it really ought to be spelled inquire, not enquire. But educated opinion didn’t prevail, and the two forms have continued in use in parallel in British English, roughly in equal frequencies, down to the present day.

However, in recent times British people have developed a difference of meaning between the two forms. Enquire tends to be used for general senses of “ask” (I might enquire after your health, or enquire about some fact or other), while inquire implies a formal investigation (as in the legal forum called a public inquiry). But this isn’t absolute by any means, and British English is being influenced by American English, in which inquire and inquiry have long been the standard forms (though the en- forms are not entirely unknown even there, albeit in rather formal situations; also enquiry is relatively more common than enquire). Australian English stands in much the same position as British English and is subject to the same forces. Canadian English, as so often, is split between American and British styles, though tending towards the former.

The second common point was that my grammar in general was very bad, especially in the first paragraph. The people would be right at home in the “anal” category. My blog entry was not a letter to Google but instead was a post to help people. I may have been missing one or two commas (although even that is debatable), but it read easily. That to me is what is important in a blog. Again, those people removed their comments after realizing the way it made them look.

The last comment was a pompous addition that it was ironic that I was complaining about AdSense yet making money by all the traffic I was getting to the blog about it. They even had proper grammar and spelling in their comment. Unfortunately, they never looked at the actual post or this blog. If they had, they would have seen that I don’t have any ads and I don’t even sell links. Its important to me that the links on this blog are ones I like and not just ones belonging to the highest bidder.

In short, I found it interesting the number of comments left about how it shouldn’t be on the front page of Digg. Almost like those leaving those comments got some satisfaction out of looking down on another webmaster. Of course, in that process they were the ones that people were laughing at. I love the concept of Digg that it is basically controlled by the users, I just laugh at the couple of people who try to control it by themselves. The truth in all of this is that I wasn’t even the one that Dugg my post (A rarity it seems). Someone liked it and put it up, at which point I saw it in my logs. That doesn’t seem to be the case when I looked over the sites submitted by those that looked down on myself and the blog.

As an ending thought, thanks to all that did Digg it and enjoyed my thoughts on the AdSense program. That is who I wrote it too and I am glad it was so well received. I have already gotten Thank You emails from a few people that were reinstated so those are the true webmasters!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Online Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.