Digging Ajaxonomy

"If you have been using the popular service Digg you know that it is very easy to submit a story and to see it start to gain traction just to be buried into the dark abyss. What I find particularly frustrating is that you don't know how many people buried the story and the reason for the bury. If you have seen Digg Spy you have noticed that the application does show buries, but you can't just track data for a particular story.

After much frustration Ajaxonomy is now releasing a Bury Recorder application. How the application works is you take the story's URL (This is the URL of the page that the "more" link on the Digg upcoming/popular pages takes you or the page that clicking on the story title takes from your profile i.e. http://digg.com/[story]) and put it into the application and once you click "Watch for Buries" the application will start recording any buries that the story receives."

Diggers Digg

"During this past year, a number of oddities emerged in the world of tech. First, Microsoft was forced to live through an unbridled flop, Apple was enjoying its meteoric rise as the most successful company of the year and social networks gained even more steam. On the back of that, the world's favorite social network, MySpace, quickly gave ground to Facebook and companies like the ill-fated Netscape tried to take on Digg.

And it's that site -- Digg.com -- that emerged this year, not necessarily as the most popular social site (it's tough to call it a full-fledged social networking company in the vein of a Facebook or MySpace), but as the best destination for people surfing the Web.

Don't believe me? Let's take a look at some other social networking sites to see why they couldn't make the cut."

Digg And Publishing

"I’ve only had a post reach Digg’s homepage once, back in 2006, and I see no great loss if it never happens again. Why would I forgo those thousands of visits? Because Publishing 2.0, like most commercialized blogs, is essentially a trade publication (to use traditional media labels), and just as my content has little relevance to Digg’s niche audience, so too does Digg’s audience have little value to Publishing 2.0.

What I’ve just said might come as a surprise to many niche blogs and traditional media publishers who play the volume game when it comes to selling the value of their online audiences. Many tech blogs report audiences measured in shear volume, i.e. hundreds of thousands or north of 1 million, and those numbers are goosed by avalanche traffic from Digg."

Happy Holidays

The Digg Coach will return Dec. 27th.

Selling Digg ?

"It’s been a little more than a month since the last rumors surfaced about social news site Digg trying to sell itself for at least $300 million. A reliable source just confirmed the company’s plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal."

Digg: New Features

New features coming to Digg:

Customizable Alerts

Groups

More here."

"Follow these 3 “simple” steps to get on DIGG front page and rocket your traffic"

After Diggs

"So we’ve had a good night sleep and the first thing we did when we woke up was obviously jump out of bed to check yesterday’s statistics and see the damage Digg.com had done to our little blog. Just before we fell asleep, we had counted 1300 diggs, at this moment the number of diggs is a massive 2256!

Once the picture post hits the frontpage and doesn’t get buried, changes are you’ve just created a nice PR5 domain. Not just because of the linkjuice Digg passes on, but there are tons of sites out there that publish the popular stories from the Digg front page. Popurls.com is one of many for example. Also a lot of .edu sites have mirrors up in case the Dugg site crashes. (We did once yesterday, but a few Apache tweaks sorted that out.) All you do is wait for the next Google update to come around and you’re more than likely going to receive a nice PR.

The Stumble Effect

Bloggers and webmasters out there who watch their traffic as closely as we do have been amazed by the “Stumble Effect”. Many know about the sudden burst of traffic that comes from the “Digg Effect” when a submission reaches the front page of Digg (or even better, if it reaches the “Top in All…” section on the frontpage). This is normally a day of joy (or terror if your server bombs) followed by limited tricklings of traffic.

Stumble has a different, more steady infusion of traffic that it can send to a website that gets stumbled, especially if it is hit by multiple top users. The effect is sustained, but more importantly, can be rejuvinated by a thumbs up and/or review by the right person/people.

Digg, on the other hand, has the advantage of having “controlled” traffic. Anyone watching their posts as they’re submitted and rising on Digg can pinpoint if and approximately when their page will go popular. You know when the traffic is coming and you know when it will stop."

Digg Headlines

"Instead of forcefully making a boring topic appear interesting, this digg user took something that would guarantee attention (Google founders) and related it to a quite uninteresting topic. The result is a Digg headline that probably got enough *blind diggs* to make it popular and it ended up getting 562 diggs (as of writing this article).

I have to admit, when I saw this headline I was in a hurry as well and gave a blind digg before I had time to read the page itself.

The only problem with this linkbait (although to be fair it was just a test) was that it could have been done much better (in terms of optimizing the landing page and in attracting links, if the digger had set up a page on their own site instead).

If you want to do some linkbaiting for your website but are having trouble making your content *interesting*, stop forcing the issue. Instead, follow this simple 3 step process:"

Digg: The Game ?

"So just how exactly is Digg.com a hidden game? Certainly, it has no

swordwielding heroes who save fantasy worlds from evildoers, but it

does have more characters than in any video game. With millions of

users, Digg has a wide array of personalities contributing to the

community. This makes it like a massive multiplayer online roleplaying

game, just without the slaying of monsters. There is a clear goal: to get to

the front page, and there are obstacles: not getting dugg up and having

to keep trying multiple times. There is fierce competition between all

Diggers for that top spot. Sometimes, they even attempt to discredit

others’ posts by commenting on poor grammar, false information, and

duplicate stories. Strategies are used to defeat other players and they are

numerous. Just as many plans for Digg domination through friendship

exist though. Seeking out the different users and adding them to the

“friends” list is among the most popular and most successful methods.

In the end, a win is only when a story has hundreds of diggs, regardless

of how you go about it. Everyone is striving to be the best at what they

do and this keeps them coming back to Digg for more."

Digging Photobucket

"It seems like Digg users have been asking for–and Kevin Rose promising–a category for images and photos forever. Well the long wait is now over and you can finally uploaded your favorite lolcats image.

At the Digg blog, Kevin Rose announces the launch of image support and also better organization of existing categories. Here’s what Digg users are waking up to today:"

"
Social news site Digg is a love-it or hate-it phenomenon. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love Digg, but I've got to admit that new competitor Mixx is worth a real close look. Mixx announced today that it's taken a strategic investment (meaning a small one with a bunch of influence anyway) from the giant newspaper the LA Times. It's just the latest in a series of deals that the little company has signed with outfits including USA Today, Reuters.com and The Weather Channel."



Let's see what you digg on Photobucket!

A very special integration for Photobucket -- with Digg at http://digg.com

Digg's Algorithm

"You already know how Digg works. Post a funny picture of Kevin Rose or a tribute to Apple's greatness and there you have it -- you're on the front page. You're not wrong. But social media maven Muhammad Saleem says there's actually a little science to Digg as well. In a post on Search Engine Land, Saleem explains how Digg's algorithm does and doesn't work. He should know. Most of his recent Digg submissions have garnered several hundred votes. Good stuff, only it runs way too long. Here's our slimmed-down version."


I learned something new from this article. Several items of importance actually.