A reader e-mailed me to say,

Some program called "Digg" has set itself up on the VC website, next to the comments on each post. I assume it's a virus or spam of some kind, so I thought I'd alert you to it so that you can have the tech people get rid of it.

It turns out that the virus is so powerful that it has infected me, and persuaded me to include it on the site. To quote Wikipedia,

Digg is a community-based news website [that] ... combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system....

If you're a digg user, then the digg button makes it easy for you to submit whatever posts of ours you find worth submitting. As Wikipedia says, "Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden increase of traffic to the 'dugg' website." That's the plan!

UPDATE: Because the fancy digg button caused hangups in some browsers, I've taken it off. The fancy link still have a few glitches, but it ought to be functional for most posts, and harmless for those where it doesn't function. I hope. Keep me posted!