2005-08-13 18:11 ☼ post
I finally stumbled across digg.com a couple days ago and I’m actually kind of surprised I had never heard of it before. I’ve seen it get mentioned in a lot more blogs (scoble, wilwheaton, connectedinternet, braytek recently, but it seems like it should have shown up on my radar a long time ago. I wonder how long digg has actually been around?
Speaking of questions, the digg.com FAQ has a pretty good explanation of what exactly it is for those that haven’t heard about it yet:
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
From a blogging perspective Digg looks like it could be a very useful way to drive traffic to quality weblog posts/articles (with a technology bent). Even if your links never reach the front page, they’re still more likely to be evaluated by a few more people than would normally find it.
As an experiment I decided to try digging a post I did last month on Honda Element Roof Racks. The post is probably kind of a stretch even for Digg’s deals sections, but I wanted to go through the link submission process and see how it worked and this seemed like a reasonable post for those purposes. The link submission process worked quite smoothly, but at the end of the process digg’s duplicate submission detector flagged it as being similar to three other submissions that contained the word Honda, but were otherwise completely different. I had the option at that point to submit anyway so I went ahead and did that.
With the post link submitted I waited a few minutes and then checked my logs to see if I was seeing any significant traffic. Happily I was. The numbers weren’t huge by any stretch of the imagination, but several people had actually come to take a look at the article and after an hour a few people had even clicked “digg it” on back on digg.com.
Based on my simple unscientific test above, I think digg.com is a great potential traffic vector to your site if you have quality content with the proper internet/computer/technology bent for digg. If your weblog and content doesn’t quite fit within those topical constraints it probably won’t work very well. That being said, it would be pretty cool to see other digg like sites that focused on other types of news and information, but I haven’t seen much evidence of that other than a diggclone project that looks like it could be used to power such sites.