Bloggasm

In an article (satirically) detailing the “7 Cheats for Hitting The Front Page of Digg,” Cracked suggests that one should “Write Something About Digg Itself.”

“It might seem complicated, but at the end of the day, Digg is all about the people who use it,” the article states. “And like most people, the average Digg user LOVES to read about himself.”

There is certainly some truth to this. Whenever one of the larger tech sites writes about the social news site — TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb — it’s not uncommon for that post to cross the front-page threshold. Given that a front page submission can drive tens of thousands of page views to an article, many have accused these sites of writing about Digg simply for the “Digg bait.”

To illustrate the high level of front page submissions that mention Digg, I searched for all the TechCrunch articles that made it to the front page of Digg over the years and organized them by the number of Diggs they received. I then tallied up the top 100 most-Dugg TechCrunch articles and divided them into two categories — those that mentioned Digg (and/or its employees) and those that don’t.

I found that 22 out of those 100 submissions mentioned Digg somewhere in the headline, while the remaining 78 didn’t. If this trend holds steady for the thousands of other TechCrunch articles that have been front paged, this means that almost one out of every four front page TechCrunch stories are about one social media company. Seems somewhat disproportionate, no?

Of course it isn’t TechCrunch’s fault that these types of stories do so well. However, when the tech blog writes a headline like “Did The UK Press Con A 104-Year-Old Woman Into Joining Twitter For Digg Bait?” it makes me want to write a headline on my own blog: “Did TechCrunch accuse the UK Press of creating Digg Bait as its own form of Digg Bait?”

And round and round it goes.