No, I'm not calling anybody a pig. It's a name of something I figured out a while back, and it take a second to explain. It's about popularity and human nature.

I saw this post at John Chow dot Com yesterday, My Top 10 Best Wordpress Plugins. It was a simple post about WordPress plugins, and what one guy thought were some good ones. Nothing special, just another post I've seen about 8 billion times. Not a big deal at all.

It got over 300 700 Diggs.

I just can't even comprehend how this works, and it explains my cynical nature towards Digg. The internet, really. Hey, how's about the whole world?

I refer to it as "The Prettiest Pig Syndrome." I'm sure there's some other logical explanation, but I like to think of it this way: given three choices, and given choice A or choice B, 99% of people will chose A or B, without even considering the unnamed choice C. And now you're wondering what this has to do with my blatant jealousy over John Chow's mad blog hits.

I'll explain.

On the internet, and in life, and on the blogs, you generally take a for or against position on things. Liberal or Conservative. Republican or Democrat. Yankees or Red Sox. Yankees or Red Coats. Mac or PC. It seems humans set up these constructs to have two major competing ideas, and no more.

You can see it on Digg, manifesting in the Apple/*nix love, with the rampant Microsoft-bashing. Look, I'll be honest with the MACStansbury, but I'm not going to be an Apple tool. I like things that work, and that's where I through my allegiances. When Apple stops making the best operating system (as deemed by me), then I'll move on to something else. It might be something from Microsoft, or it might be something else. I will seek options, and choosing from everything I can find.

I believe this is the type of personality that doesn't work well inside the Diggosphere. Something I found hard-to-understand was how you had only two choices on every news story: to Digg, or not to Digg. There was no way to proclaim a story anything but good or evil. I just don't think that way with everything, as everything has its strengths and weaknesses; I "dig" conjecture.

This is also why I'll never be an internet superstar; I have no ego as to think I can tell people what to think. As much as I love to talk about me, I rarely practice the phrase I made popular a couple of years ago, the shameless self-promotion. This is not a quality one needs to have to succeed in the Diggosphere, something that people like John Chow have shown me.

To explain how this post got started in the first place, a couple of weeks ago, a fella who's been blogging for a long time, and who's got some other successful blogs, got a front-page Digg. Then, another. And, because of those Diggs, playing on the other Diggs...you get the picture. The masses have something to read, and the blog gets Almost 1000 RSS Readers. Good for him.

Now, for those of you who've been reading MacStansbury.com since the move over to WordPress in April (that would be all 0 of you), you'd know I'm pretty giving of my knowledge of the plugins. When I find something neat, I like to tell you about it - that's what I do. It doesn't pour on the audience participation or anything, but it does make me feel good, knowing I've entertained and informed.

Sure, I'd love the mad Digg-love (well, maybe not), but only if I was doing that entertaining or informing. Getting a lot of traffic (like for the iBox posts) is something I work for, and I'm happy when it happens. It doesn't happen a lot, and I'm okay with that, since I rarely put up anything all that interesting. But that post I linked to on Digg, that explains how I get frustrated sometimes, all because of the prettiest pigs.

John Chow put up a post of just 10 WordPress plugins that he thought were good things to have on your site, and gave a brief description of each. Somebody submitted it to Digg. It got the mad Digg love, because it was somebody Diggers were familiar with, was popular, and they tend to herd around things they like. This is the Prettiest Pig Syndrome.

John Stansbury could post stuff until he's blue in the fingers, and nobody'd submit it to Digg. Even if somebody did, the redirect would shield me from any mad Digg love. For those one or two people who would show up, it's unlikely they'd stay around, since I'm not in the Diggerati, and I'm not part of some phenomenon or whatnot. The difference in the two Johns is one has been given the blessing of the masses, and the other one hasn't.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling anybody a pig. It's alliteration, and my tribute to the movie Babe. It means there are some folks in the world that get an inordinate amount of attention for doing the same thing as everybody else, but since they have a level of notoriety above the common, they add to their notoriety. The notoriety can be good or bad (e.g. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears), and it tends to either keep going on and on, or stops dead in its tracks. Once you loose your notoriety, it's almost impossible to get it back.

And that's what I see with the Digg of the John Chow post. Now, you're thinking that I'm talking about John Chow, and how I'm all bitterly envious and stuff. While I do have a near-psychotic jealous rage going on, the Prettiest Pig Syndrome isn't with John Chow - it's with Digg. They have deemed him one of their collective favorites, and now every post with either be thought of in terms of Digg-worthy or not. Your choice is either A or B. That's what happens once you get popular.

It'll be interesting to watch the process. Soon, somebody will comment, "I remember John Chow dot com before it started to suck." Then there will be some ridiculous flame-war. People will take sides, words will be said, feelings will be hurt. Many blog posts will be written on the relative merits of the level of suck at John Chow dot com.

And I'll sit here, in relative obscurity, going through my RSS feeds, going through the posts from Digg, wondering what it would be like to get on Techmeme. I'll wonder what the A-list parties are like (they have them, they just don't tell us about them). Then the day will come when the Diggers turn on John Chow dot com, for no reason at all.

That's the day they find a new pig, or car, or shiny object. That's how it always goes, people move on to the next thing to distract them. All good things come to an end, and it's never fully for reasons we can comprehend.

I guess the whole reason I wrote this was because of a visceral reaction to that post getting so much attention. Bitter jealousy, you see. Maybe, someday, when I get famous, I'll be able to get 10,000 hits for a post on what I ate for breakfast.

http://digg.com/entertainment/Reeses\_Puffs\_is\_the\_bomb\_cereal\_yo

status: published
lastmod: '2006-10-12T17:10:46.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
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  similarterms: digg john post chow good people prettiest love things syndrome plugins wordpress choice notoriety internet blog apple move work diggs