Geeks vs Hollywood – Why Digg, Wired & Twitter Need Ashton, Brad & Oprah

Mike Arrington wrote yesterday about a funny PR pitch from DIGG asking him to write about the upcoming Diggnation episode in Las Vegas with Kevin Rose and – the man with more followers than Scientology – Ashton Kutcher.

Long story short, Arrington points out that Rose should be in his office taking care of the diggbar and the bad feedback that floats around DIGG these days, rather than having fun in Vegas with the Hollyood gang. And that sounds like a good idea if we’re looking at what kind of comments Mike got for the article; it seems that DIGG it’s really not that popular anymore, now that you get all the links you need from your Twitter friends in real-time.

But, is it really a bad idea to have some Hollywood love on your side? The Twitter amazing story teach us a different lesson: if you have lots of early adopters – then you’re cool, but if you have lots of celebrities using your service – then you go mainstream and get tons of new users who found about your service from TV or newspapers (remember the Oprah Effect?). So maybe it’s not such a terrible idea to show off with some popular kinds, like Bruno or Ashton.

On the other side, there’s WIRED – the most popular geek magazine ever – who got Brad Pitt on the cover for the latest issue and a big cover story on Brad’s guide to a social media world titled How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans. The whole thing is as funny and useful as every other Wired guide, but being powered by Brad Pitt (and Quentin Tarantino) the story gone wild on some new channels for this kind of magazine: gossip mags, tabloids, and even celeb TV shows. So is this a bad thing for WIRED?

I think we’re witnessing some kind of pop culture clash, a new underground-needs-mainstream story, that should not be observed with fear but welcomed and encouraged in order for the geek joints to became more popular to the mainstream users, so the business could evolve faster.

What do you guys feel about this?

Catalin Zorzini

Catalin is a social media racounteur at Mostash - a small social media studio - and he's always happy to share his passion for graphic design. Catalin Zorzini has 183 posts at Inspired Mag & counting!