I've talked before about how powerful Digg has become, even displacing the venerable Slashdot in its power to drive traffic to one's site. Digg, however, has remained somewhat of a mystery to me in how news and blog posts actually become popular enough to hit the front page of Digg, the equivalent of "being Slashdotted," with the potential to even higher page views.
What's the secret to getting Dugg?
Digg offers a rather pedantic description of the process, but to get the low-down on the process I turned to a regular reader of this blog, and a veritable Digg rock star, Rami Taibah. With over 100 front-page stories on Digg, Taibah knows how to make Digg work.
As it turns out, however, Taibah couldn't offer me any silver bullets, but he did demystify the process. Getting Dugg is hard work and far different from Slashdot, which largely relies on writing stories of interest to its founder, Rob Malda, and his human editorial team:
Well, Digg is kind of different than Slashdot because the human interaction is almost minimal (if any). They [Digg] basically have a VERY complicated algorothim that promotes story to the front page based many factors. Digg like to put it as "the algorithm calculates the diversity of diggs," meaning that if you have a bunch of friends always digging your stuff and nobody else, you aren't going anywhere.
Hmm...so what's the secret? The secret, it turns out, is hard work, and very similar to working with open-source software: community:
Honestly, it's a tough job, but it all goes down to engaging with the community, learning what clicks with them, digging other users in upcoming section....
Taibah has a lot of friends on Digg, not all of which Digg all of his stories (which is good, as noted above, as if they did his "Digg power" on a given post would actually go down: Digg wants a diversity of people to Digg up posts and so getting the same crew to Digg you works once or twice and then fails forever more.
In summary, what's the secret of getting Dugg? Writing good content, working hard with a community of followers to ensure they see it and engage with that content, and then praying it all works. Taibah has made a science of it, but for most of us the best source of success is to focus on quality of content.
Oh, and it helps that he has 2,500-plus followers on Digg, which means that he has a ready-made audience of fans that tend to like the things he Diggs, but who's counting? :-)
Digg just got a bit more powerful with a Firefox 3 extension that broadens its reach across the Internet. As seen in the Kevin Rose-narrated video below, the extension adds a toolbar and web-wide notifications. It's a very cool way to see and drive Digg coverage on stories that you may already be reading online, and to then follow the Digg commentary.
Digg Firefox 3 Extension from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.
It's very cool to see services like Digg taken out of the "website" context and turned into web-wide applications. It's even better to see them enabled in an open-source browser like Firefox, especially when the toolbar is open source.
Reading through my RSS feeds this morning, I noticed a reasonably large concentration of Diggs focused on Reddit's decision to go open source. Maybe someone thinks Digg's executive team actually reads through the froth?
Reddit gets Dugg
(Credit: Matt Asay)I guess the real problem it points out is not a code problem with Digg, but rather a people problem, since the Digg system prompts the submitter to verify that the submission is unique. Perhaps these Reddit fans chose not to notice that scads of similar postings had already hit Digg? :-)
Traffic Sources for The Open Road - All Time
(Credit: Matt Asay)Last week I had two stories Dugg and two stories Slashdotted. The difference in traffic is striking. Digg delivered three times the amount of traffic as Slashdot did. Granted, my stories hit Slashdot in an off-peak time, but it got me thinking: Is Digg the future of web traffic? The tyranny of the mob, as Slashdot's Rob Malda once called it?
If so, I'm concerned. I like the traffic Digg gives me, but I also like the editorial function that Slashdot provides. I have no clue how something becomes popular on Digg - I'm constantly surprised by the types of stories I get Dugg. But I know how to get something Slashdotted: Deliver something that Rob Malda finds interesting.
Certain kinds of stories are more likely to be Dugg: anti-Microsoft screeds, pro-Linux (and especially Ubuntu) and Apple posts (See below). To get Slashdotted, an article needs to chart new territory, even if in these old paths. That's because Rob knows what is new and interesting, and what isn't. Digg doesn't. It's just a crowd (Read: Lowest-common denominator).
Again, I'm not complaining about the traffic. I would simply like to have the crowdsourcing power of Digg with the editorial oversight of Slashdot. Impossible?
... Read moreIn a meme reminiscent of Nick Carr ("The cult of the amateur"), Rob Malda of Slashdot fame has riffed on the fallibility of Digg's model:
"...[W]ith sites like Digg, it's the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you're going to get."
Some will call this sour grapes on Malda's part. I, however, think he has a point. I don't look to Digg to tell me what's important or newsworthy. It really does reek of a cattle call for she who makes up the silliest headlines or, worse yet, coordinated news "attacks" by groups that know how to goose the system.
... Read more
I'm with Nick Carr on this one: Techmeme doesn't drive much traffic. Nor does Valleywag, in my experience. These sites are said to be important within Silicon Valley circles, but I've had stories hit both, and the most I've seen from them is a few hundred pageviews.
Digg drives tens of thousands. Slashdot is the same. Groklaw, too, is up there. The Silicon Valley aggregators? Not so much.
It may be, as Nick allows, that these sites are important for the influencers that read them. But they're certainly not important for volume. Nick writes:
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