Why digg (still) rocks: small is big

There has been a lot of controversy on digg lately initiated by a comment by Kevin Rose that led to a top contributor to say goodbye. Many other top users have rallied around P9 (the top contributor) and have supported him by removing their avatars in protest.

While this may seem like it shakes the foundation of digg, I believe that it does the opposite. A blog post by seomoz.org demonstrates that the top 100 diggers submit 56% of the front page content on digg.com. In light of this stat, I believe the current protest will do nothing but give the average digger a better chance at getting promoted. This touches on why digg is successful in the first place. It provides a channel for the average person who has found or written great content to get noticed.

Submitting your own stories (digg me!)

While sometimes frowned upon by the digg community, submitting your own blog post or link to digg can be very rewarding. Because of the democratic nature of digg, self-promotion should be fully embraced. It gives an opportunity to new blogs and websites to get some deserved attention. As long as there is no gaming of the system, the quality of the content will determine its fate, independent of who submitted it and why.

I've submitted several ProductWiki articles (two written by me, and one by Omar) to digg with the hope of getting some attention and three have been promoted to the homepage (this, this, and this). A lot of time went in to each of these articles, and because they were well-written, in-depth, and timely, they were promoted.

The digg effect bump

Many webmasters and bloggers are very well aware of the digg effect. There is an initial rush of traffic that comes with a front-page promotion followed by a rather rapid decay. However, an insightful article from seomoz's blog demonstrates that all is not lost through a concept coined the linkbait bump.

Basically, the idea is that while the traffic behaves a lot like a spike, there is still an opportunity to retain some small portion of the people who make up the spike. These retained users effectively bump your readership to a higher plateau. If you can repeat the digg effect over and over again, you can ratchet up your traffc level and the size of your community.

This may seem like a technique that games digg, however, the only way this technique works is to a) have great content, b) get dugg through a democratic process, c) retain users because you have a great site. If you believe that this constitutes gaming, then you are missing the point.

Leveling the playing field

digg allows the small guy to compete the big guys (slate.com, cnn.com, nytimes.com) on equal footing. I think the most famous example of a small startup site getting a lot of noteriety because of digg is TechCrunch. In the last year, there have been 130 TC posts promoted to the front page. This a significant catalyst in their success. (Personally, this is how I found them about 6 months ago).

Instead of waiting on the big search engines to crawl, index, and promote your content, you can get instant results from great content using the social phenomenom that is digg.

If David were a blogger battling the Internet Goliath, then digg would be his sling.