Since the Digg crew seem to have way too much time on their hands, it’s probably not surprising that they would come up with the idea of creating a real-life Digg button — one that sits in Digg’s lobby and displays the number of times someone has Dugg the Digg button on a page called (what else) diggthediggbutton.com. Of course, it seems as though they put one too few digits in the LED display, since by the time I looked at it last it had 11,458 Diggs and the display was only four digits long.
Apparently, the idea was sparked Kevin Rose of Digg got together with girl geek Ladyada of Adafruit and Phil Torrone of Makezine, and they decided it would be fun to give proto-hackers something hands on to build, and decided on a real-world Digg button with a small chip and LED display. So then the Revision3 gang decided to build their own larger version and put it in the Digg headquarters, hooked up to an Ethernet connection, so that anyone who Dugg the idea of the button could watch their Digg reflected in real time. And then it occurred to me — why don’t we put a bunch of these real-world Digg buttons on actual objects?
We could put them on the local Starbucks outlet, a local panhandler, the corner newstand, etc. Then people could press a button and vote for their favourite places. This guy tried to do something similar, but it involves a whole lot of Post-It Note pads and markers, and seems to be a whole lot of work.