Enterprise Initiatives

My article Open Source and Microsoft Free was posted on Slashdot last week. I woke up on Saturday and looked at my traffic on Sitemeter. My daily traffic before this day was in the 100 range. That morning it read 2000+. I rubbed my eyes thinking that I was not quite awake yet and hit refresh. It shot up another 100. I was averaging several hundred hits an hour. Holy Smokes, I thought to myself! I then went and looked at my referrals and it was all Slashdot. After lunch, I looked again and I was over 6000. A quick peak at the referrals and I saw the Diggs coming it. The next few days were incredible. The article drew over 50,000 hits in a week! Then came the Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Craigslist, Linuxworld, Linux.org, and Japanese & Polish versions of Digg & Del.icio.us. It is been over a week now and I still get a few hundred hits a day from that post. That's the good part of being Dugg.

I probably received north of 500 comments across these sites. I am used to the comments that I receive on ITToolbox where I host my main blog. The comments are usually very collaborative in nature, even if the commenter disagrees with my point of view. I have built a very nice network of experts from the professional community on ITToolbox. Compare that to the discussions going on at Digg and some of the other social bookmarking sites. My article turned into an all out war between Microsoft and Linux fan boys. There was so much negativity, profanity, and non fact based opinions going on that I received very little value from the 500+ comments. As a matter of fact, I stopped reading it after a while. I would have had more factual conversations had I walked into a bar loaded with Yankee and Red Sox fans and argued whether Big Papi or A-Rod was a better hitter!

So being Dugg is nice from a traffic point of view, but my real goal with these posts is to share my opinions and collaborate with professionals to refine, defend, or validate my opinions. On Digg, it's all a bunch of noise.