I have been using digg recently and I started to like it more than slashdot. I also recently read a post about the digg story and that also got me more interested in how digg works and how many people use it so I decided to do my little digg experiment during this weekend.
I first created a digg account and the process was fast and very easy. Then I decided to upload a post from my own blog to be able to track the impact of how many people look at those diggable stories (I swear it was not self promotion!! I had no other way to count page views but that looking at my own stats). Huge mistake!!! Right after submitting the story I got two nasty comments from angry fellow diggers complaining that I should not link to blogs but direcltly to the story (my post was a comment on someone else post) and that I should check duplicates since the original story was already submitted by someone else (I actually did look at the duplicated list but the first ones were irrelevant so I decided to ignore it, my bad). My story surprinsingly generated more than 200 visits to my blog within half an hour so at least part of my experiment was sucessfull, in spite of submitting a story the wrong way, I did verify that they were 100s of diggers on a Saturday evening looking for stories to digg (and the post ended up getting several diggs as well!!). Within half an hour, my story dissapeared from the diggable stories, I guess because some of those angry diggers used the report problem feature on my submitted post or I did not get enought diggs to stay there (note: you cannot see how many problems have been reported to a story that you have submitted so it is not clear why a submitted story will dissapear from the digg area and what triggers that, I guess it is better to keep that secret to avoid people cheating on digg).
So I tried to then go ahead and post some story from someone else to see whether I get many diggs there and make it to the home page but after trying for a while, I could not find anything interesting that I read recently that it was not already submitted (this time I religiously read through the duplicated list to avoid some more people getting mad at me). This was very impressive since I read more than a hundred blogs and I tried with many stories so it sort of help on my experiment to see whether many people were using digg to submitt stories (a foundational stone for the effectiveness of digg being a community site). So far, so good, I got evidence of many people digging and many people submitting stories.
Finally, the last part of my experiment consisted in submitting an original story from my own blog so I could track again how many people look at it versus how many people digg it. This prove a challenge since it had to be something about technology and it had to be completely new content. I first through about submitting some old posts but the digg community seems to be really interested in just very recent posts (one of the options at the "report feature" is "old news"). So finally I came up with someothing that might fit the content that the digg community enjoys, here is the post about how I use my Bose headphones case to store my iPod nano. Within half an hour of the post I had 60 people coming to my site from digg and got 5 diggs, not bad, I also managed to stay in the digging area and no one post any bad comments to it. The traffic was lower than the previos bad post but I guess that the time was also not good (a Saturday evening versus a Sunday afternoon). So I decided to wait a bit longer until my post dissapears. Three hours later I was in the top ten of digged stories within the Apple tag and had another few hundred visitors in my site coming from digg. However, I was really buried inside the overall list and certainly far away to make it to the home page, I was in the low tens duggs versus the top stories of digg have been dugg several hundred times.
Anyway, overall it was a fun experiment and it showed me few things about digg
1.-There is enough users submitting stories, I read all sort of blogs, mainstream and not but most of what I considered interesting from the last few days was already posted. The duplicate feature needs some work though, many of the things that you get as a duplicate are not really duplicates which makes it more tedious to avoid submitting a duplicate.
2.-There is enough users reading the submitted stories and digging them, this was confirmed by the tracking to the links back to my blog.
3.-The self regulation community mechanism of digg for reporting issues on the stories submitted certainly works, my first bad post went away really fast due to users reporting problems while the legitimate one did survive for several hours (and still is there).
4.- With some many stories being submitted, you got to have something interesting to make it to the home page of digg which validates the model.
CD
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