10e20 Blog

It’s a pretty universal truth in the industry that Todd and Neil are two very highly regarded experts on Digg. I’ve taken the liberty to write a little about what they’ve discussed in a recent WebProNews video interview about how Digg should be leveraged as a community tool with my own feedback.

Digg is a community tool — and that community is strong.

There’s an obvious trend about why a lot of Digg items are “buried” (and rightfully so in such cases): some folks submit everything on their sites to Digg for purposes of monetization. However, the Digg community will notice that — by banning domains, and in some instances, the backlash could be extremely damaging.

If you’re looking for monetization, there are ways to do so — though it’s not an immediate process of submitting all your site’s content to Digg. Instead, it’s a matter of building a trust profile. Todd estimates that if three of your stories hit the front page, you’re in the top 1% of users. This profile itself can take a few months to develop and entails more than just submitting articles that may not be of any interest to others — it entails community involvement, interaction, commenting, and Digging stories that are relevant and interesting to you. Further, it is helpful to actually focus on a particular industry. Over time, you can be considered an expert in a certain area.

It helps to network with people and become their friends, thereby having them notice you and getting your story Dugg by more users. Neil mentions that there’s also a caveat to this tactic: many people join Digg crews, but the Digg algorithm detects patterns that can negatively affect the time (and amount of Diggs) your story takes to make the front page. A story that would normally need 30 Diggs, for example, might take 50. Therefore, you shouldn’t necessarily just Digg a story because your friend on a regular basis — the algorithm can catch on and those votes will be less effective.

The algorithm is acknowledged to have been modified at a very rapid pace; Todd says this is even better than major search engines. Personally, I feel that to appease those who have been left in the cold, there’s still a long way for Digg to go. Being that it is a social community, Digg’s staff (they’re human, aren’t they?) has an obligation to address outstanding concerns.

But despite this, Digg appears to be the leader in technology. However, there are other social networks that are also popular. The main players, according to Neil, are del.icio.us and Netscape (which is more politics-centric), with Reddit coming shortly behind due to its plus-or-minus rating system.

Ultimately, it is suggested that while Digg might be the leader in tech, other social networks will slowly take away some of Digg’s traffic and evolve into different verticals, much like Deals.com has done where it focuses exclusively on deals.

So while Digg is hot right now, I suppose we should expect some changes in the upcoming months.

Posted by Tamar Weinberg at 3:45 pm
Bookmark this post: