Voting with digg and del.icio.us

Ideas need attention to turn into action.  We’re deluged with ideas; we don’t have enough time to read them all let alone act on them.

But we have do have tools to use to draw other people’s attention to ideas we agree with, especially those where we think action is required.

One tool is digg. If you have a free digg account, you can “digg” a news article that you like.  Articles that get “dugg” a lot in a short period of time go the front page of digg where they get lots of attention – although for a short period of time.

Another tool is del.icio.us.  If you tag or bookmark an article there, other people have an easier time finding it.  If an article gets enough tags, it becomes a favorite and more people see it.

My previous post includes an open letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin urging that we learn from Hurricane Katrina and require that phone line providers like BellSouth immediately supply voice mail and/or call forwarding for unusable lines during an emergency.  Anyone will be able to reach the voice mail (an probably a reassuring announcement) of anyone whose phone number they know.

This action will avoid the desperate search for friends and loved ones that we saw so graphically in the days after Katrina.  It will let emergency workers know who is and isn’t accounted for.  It is technically easy; but, for some reason, BellSouth didn’t do it voluntarily.

If you agree with this idea or even agree that it needs discussion, I hope you’ll write as well – even blog if you’re a blogger.  But two simple ways you can help an idea get attention and become an action are to digg or tag the idea.

You can digg my open letter here.  You can tag it here – I’m using the tags “reachability”, “disaster_preparation”, and “fcc_action” but you should use whatever tag you think is most relevant.