BlogDigg & Readers
We certainly had a fun experience with Digg today. And by fun, I mean, informative and not fun at all.
We beat pretty much everyone to the punch with Google Maps for Mobile 2.0 coverage today, and so we thought it would be a good idea to add the giant Digg button to the article. We’ve been testing social news integration for several months, you’ve see that if you click on the full article… we now have a full list of social bookmarking and sharing options, in addition to our existing Email Article support.
In fact, looking at Digg results for Google Maps for Mobile today, it’s clear: We were the first to cover its release.
Now, when you look at the number of diggs… we come in near to dead last. So, what’s going on?
We suspect the answer is clear: Our readers don’t use Digg. They don’t use Digg at all. Either that, or nobody is actually reading PhoneNews.com… not likely since we broke the 3 GHz barrier today for CPU utilization, serving pages well into the six figures over the past 24 hours.
So, what are we going to do about this? Well, the most direct option would be “Don’t use Digg”. But, that doesn’t add up for us. We think that’s a bad route to take because social news coverage is a growth tool… it helps new people discover PhoneNews.com. In short, if we were using it for existing readers, we would scrap it for low usage. But, we’re trying to add new readers with that usage.
The next best option is to find better ways to devote less resources… in short, outsource or integrate. So, we’re going to test better options that enable social news and make it more transparent to participate.
The actual answer is that Digg and the other sites like it appear to be being gamed successfully by bot nets to gain front page exposure. There’s a long standing pattern of this occurring–so any “real” site has to fight 20 times harder to get anywhere. The bots vote you down while voting themselves up. So you could be first there, but you have little chance to get anywhere unless you are coordinating your own group of people to raise your vote count–which ethical people don’t do.