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."