Webnames.ca Staff
With the advent of Web 2.0 the Internet has become more of a community then ever before. Sites like Myspace.com and Facebook are hugely popular, and so they should be. They’ve created thriving online communities, but I’m not here to talk about that, my post today is about the best social networking site on the Internet (as far as I am concerned anyway).
Digg.com is brainchild of Kevin Rose, and unless you are as geeky as I am his name probably doesn’t ring a bell. Rose used to co-host a television show called The Screen Savers which was the flagship show for TechTV network. The show was pretty much a bunch of computer geeks sitting around and talking technology – they began with a short commentary on the day’s tech-related news, had some interesting guests and a lot of laughs. Unfortunately, TechTV was purchased by G4 TV in May of 2004.
During his time at TechTV and G4, Kevin Rose had been working on a pet project that he described as a ‘news site’ where users would pick the content and be the editors. The idea was to give the users non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control over what was featured – and this is what makes Digg.com so cool.
Digg.com uses social bookmarking, blogging and syndication to promote news stories and/or websites submitted by its users. The ranking system is completely user-based. Newly submitted stories appear in the Upcoming Stories section for all people to view. When users like a story they click the “Digg” button associated with it. If a story accumulates enough “Diggs” it will appear on the front page under “Popular Stories”.
As you may have guessed, Digg.com can be a powerful tool for generating traffic. If you have interesting content to share, post a link to your article on Digg.com and see if it generates some traffic for your website or blog. And if your story happens to make the front page things will get really fun …
The Digg Effect is something that happens to most sites once they hit the front page of Digg.com. Any links that make it to the front page are guaranteed to get millions of hits. Now if you are on a small web hosting package or if your server is not powerful enough to handle all of this new traffic it will most likely crash and become unavailable for some time. This in itself of course isn’t good, but it goes to show how much traffic a top story on Digg.com can generate.
And if you can’t get enough of Digg.com, I encourage you to also check out Diggnation. Diggnation is a weekly technology and web culture podcast based on the top stories from Digg.com. Diggnation is hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, the two best hosts from ScreenSavers! Because the stories can range from funny to interesting or even shocking at times, it’s cool to hear Kevin and Alex’s take on things while they hang out drinking beer.
And that’s it for my second post,
Max – Webnames.ca resident Geek