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If you're searching for localized gardening info on the Internet, or seeking a green thumb friend with similar passions, you now may be able to find both with one click of the mouse. A new social networking Web site, www.digthedirt.com, is designed to put gardeners in touch with other gardeners on an information-packed website dedicated to all aspects of the growing hobby of gardening. DigtheDirt.com goes beyond blogs and forums to create a virtual back fence over which gardeners (whether across the country or right next door) can share their experiences while together building the most comprehensive interactive source of horticultural ideas and information ever created.
The website is the brainchild of Seattle-based Web veteran and gardener Cliff Sharples, who calls his team's creation "a gardener's virtual playground for meeting, seeking, learning and obsessing over shared enthusiasms."
DigtheDirt.com is built on a social networking and publishing platform uniquely tailored for home gardeners, connecting people with shared interests, garden conditions and geographic locations. The site offers the type of powerful social networking tools familiar to users of Facebook and Twitter and the combines those networking tools with a social database of plants for the home garden, garden how-to information and inspirational landscape and design ideas. These resources are dynamic, designed to gain depth, detail and relevance with user input, harnessing what Sharples calls, "the wisdom of the crowd."
Sharples is one of the founding partners of the Web's first gardening megasite, garden.com. Launched in 1995, the original garden.com – a combination of e-magazine, information hub and pioneering e-commerce emporium – was one of the largest and most ambitious websites ever dedicated to gardening. Born, as its URL name suggests, early in the dotcom boom of the nineties, it fell victim to the dotcom stock meltdown. Sharples went on to start several venture-backed Internet-based companies and maintains a successful career as an Internet consultant. He says he is thrilled to be back in the gardening sector.
"I'm a gardener. This is coming home," says Sharples, who is founder and "Chief Cultivator" of the site. "Gardeners love to share. We swap seeds, plants, stories, frustrations, successes, advice and ideas. A social networking site for gardeners just makes sense.
"We took our time putting DigtheDirt together. We wanted to tap into the freedom and power of social networking, but we also need to build in sophisticated foundations for security, privacy, interaction and sharing. With Facebook's increasingly complex privacy concerns, not to mention its all-things, all-topics approach to feeding users a deluge of information that includes anything your friends and acquaintances can think of, I believe a specialized community built around an information resource that centers on the passion of home gardening has great appeal, and can be truly useful.
"A garden needs structure and care, so does a good garden social networking site," concludes Sharples. At DigtheDirt, gardeners benefit from democratic social interaction, enhanced by expert commentary, editing and information.