Like your mommy told you you should be careful of what you wish for because you just might get it. For months now, I have submitted posts from various blogs where I pontificate to Digg where they have consistently failed to amuse the wise crowd in any statistically meaningful way. The most Diggs I've ever gotten was 9, I think, and I voted twice on different computers. Until Monday, that is.

As fate would have it, I used to be friendly with Don Imus many years ago and like him a lot and know him to be an exceptionally big hearted person who has overcome some enormous personal problems and done exceptional things for sick children and war vets. A lot more good, I might add, than many of those who screamed loudest for his scalp and finally got it.

My point was not that what Imus said (and why does everyone on cable TV seem to take such glee in repeating it) was not offensive. It was. My point is that he did not create the popular culture which has come to accept this sort of casual racism as everyday conversation and that-for reasons you'll need to read the article to understand-Al Sharpton is the last human being on the planet to whom he should be performing his mea culpa.

I posted the piece-called Al Sharpton is a Big Fat Hypocrite-on a political group blog I started years ago and have largely abandoned over the last year or two. Naturally, I also hit the Digg button and recommended my splendid little rant to the masses.

I woke up on Tuesday morning, clicked on the link to Best of the Blogs, and got a server error notice. I rang up my web host, waited in the queue for a half hour, and learned that they had disabled my blog because it was overwhelmed with traffic. I asked the nice fellow to re-boot me, which he did, and I hung up. Five minutes later, the site disappeared again.

By the time, it occurred to me to take a look at Digg and see what was happening. Sure enough, my fat Al post has become "popular," whatever that means in Diggsville and had gotten about 300 Diggs.

I called my web host back, waited in the queue for another half hour, spoke to a different person who told me my options were to upgrade to a dedicated or virtual server which would cost me another $50 or so a month. Since this was likely to be a one-time thing, I told him to just leave the site down.

That didn't discourage the Diggers. By noon, there were about 500 Diggs-most of them from people who couldn't have read the post since the server was down. About one o'clock I had a bright idea and reposted the piece on a different blog that has a lot more bandwidth. Then I called my web host back, waited in the queue for a half-hour, and asked the nice fellow there to do a redirect that would send visitors to a different web address. By now, it was almost 3 pm and the Diggs had passed 700 and were still pouring in. And they kept on coming. As of this writing the post has 1322 Diggs (and hundreds of comments) but the traffic has slowed down enough that I've been able to call and, with the usual 30 minute wait in the queue, have the nice people at OLM point the traffic back to the original post.

This was my first experience in tapping into the mass power of social media and I must say it left me a little shaken. It has made me think even harder about the frightening potential all this connectedness has for turning crowds into mobs and how easily social networking tools can amplify and turn small dumb things into large ugly things. Doesn't mean we need a Bloggers Code of Conduct or that we need to turn radio or cable TV into even blander pools of political correctness (what's wrong with simply switching the damned channel or going to another blog if you're offended?). What it does mean is that we can't ever assume on the web that nobody is listening. Sometimes they are.