This is an interesting article from MediaShift on digg’s evolution from a site mostly focused on technology stories to expanded issues, including their now most popular section–politics. The biggest complaint from some users is the liberal leanings of the posts (but maybe that just shows the organizing savvy and advanced use of technology by liberal media producers and their audiences? Hmmm?). Of course, there is also a nod to the tech-savvy of the “Ron Paulites.”

But the article also tells the story of AJ Wysocki, who was turned onto digg and social story sharing because of his affiliation to the liberal media outlet, The Young Turks. (Long quote from article, but I thought it was a great little case study. More below the excerpt…)

AJ Wysocki, 27, has only been a member and reader of Digg since June. He opened his account because a liberal political radio show he frequently listens to, The Young Turks, enlisted him as a “web soldier” and charged him with promoting the content of the show online.

“They were looking for people to do stuff on Digg and Facebook and MySpace,” he told me in a phone interview. “So I basically took Digg. What that meant is that every day I go on and submit video clips they do on Digg, and I also submit all the blog posts they write. That’s how I got started on the site really.”

Wysocki became a heavy listener of “The Young Turks” after the 2004 election; it was then that he grew increasingly interested in politics, and he followed the hosts as the program traveled from Sirius Satellite Radio to Air America and then later when it was dropped from the liberal radio network and became an independent entity. When they asked him to help them promote content on the social news site, he only had a vague idea of what it was.

“I’ve seen the little icon, because I read Huffington Post a lot, and I saw that little Digg icon but I never really looked at it,” Wysocki said. “And then I visited it and I thought this is a good idea because you can really build hype. If someone has an interesting story and you have enough friends to vote on it, it’s kind of like democracy. If you really like it then a lot of people see it and then it gets to the front page and a whole bunch more people see it.”

In the short time that he’s been a user of the site he has become a heavy reader, eventually expanding his submissions to include content not created by the Young Turks. In the process, a few of his submissions have ended up on the coveted front page.

Curious about how The Young Turks had engaged the young Wysocki to become their “web soldier”, I went on an investigation (i.e. visited their site) and saw that they had the specific link “Promote” that details out ways for their audience members to market and support the program through social networking and sharing. For example, they tell audience members what to do with Digg:

Digg our podcast and our video clips
Help get our podcast on the top of the news podcast page on Digg. Vote for our podcast on Digg here.
Don’t forget to Digg our daily clips, found on our Web site or YouTube.
Why stop at Digg? Don’t be shy. You can also support the show by ranking our clips, videos, and blogs through Google Trackback, Technorati Trackback, del.icio.us, and Reddit. So start clicking!

Now, for many of us in the media world, this is pretty elementary stuff. But how many of us explicitly ask and describe for our audience members how to share the info and what the result will be ? Most of us just have the little icons on the bottom of our posts. Maybe many of us think that our audience members already know what to do with these buttons and what the results will be, but if the story of A.J. is a good example, that’s clearly not the case. So the lesson is: If it seems so simple, it’s stupid to do–then it’s a probably a good idea.

So–oh yeah. If you’re reading–go digg this post! The little button is the first one on the left. And post to delicious and share on Facebook and, well… you get the point.