Bloggasm

Does this mean Rand doesn’t have as much online viral support as his father?

During the Republican primaries in 2008, nary a day went by that candidate Ron Paul wasn’t mentioned on the front page of Digg, sometimes several times in a single day. Diggers dug up on YouTube videos, favorable articles about the candidate, blog posts by Ron Paul fans, and “money bombs” intended to raise millions of dollars in a 24-hour period.

Today, his son Rand, a rising star in the Republican party who shares many of his father’s same views, faces off in the Kentucky US Senate Republican primaries against Trey Grayson. Many pundits acknowledge the “semi-celebrity status” of Rand and link it to his father’s fan base. Given this, one would think Digg, arguably the largest online outlet to push Ron into the national spotlight, would have similar maniacal support.

But a quick look at the metrics shows this isn’t the case, indicating he still has a ways to go before he has the same star power as his dad. In total, Ron’s name has been mentioned in 16,102 submitted stories, while Rand has 666. But that’s from Digg’s entire history (Ron Paul, being around longer, would have a significant advantage), what about the last month? In the last 30 days, Ron has seen 234 submitted stories mentioning his name and Rand is lagging behind with 69. The one instance that Rand beats his father is having one story reach the front page in the last month while Ron receives no front pagers. However, in that same period, Ron has had five stories get over 50 diggs while Rand has only had one story reach that number.

What about most-Dugg posts? Ron Paul’s most-dugg story received a staggering 21,266 diggs. Rand’s most-dugg story? 1,658. There are over 200 Ron Paul stories that have more Diggs than this.

What about the rest of the online sphere? Digg isn’t everything.

Within the past 30 days, 13,974 blog posts have mentioned Rand while 64,659 have covered Ron. The son eeks out a slight victory in traditional news outlets, with 1,992 mentions in Google News for the last month compared to his father’s 1,806.

So what does this mean? Well, obviously a Senate primary race isn’t as big a news event as a Presidential primary. And the quick expansion of Digg over the past two years likely means that its demographics have become increasingly mainstream. Also, many articles and blog posts mention Ron when writing about Rand, which could explain part of the reason why he receives more mentions in total. Either way, we are not being bombarded with the constant pro-Rand Paul coverage that annoyed many during the Ron Paul race, which spawned the sometimes-derogatory term “Paulites” (at least when it was used by his detractors).

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This chart comes from Silicon Alley Insider

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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.

I just caught this tweet from Digg founder Kevin Rose:

Not only is Kevin using a Tinyurl link, but he’s using it to link to a Digg submission.

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A few paragraphs into a Wired article about how in tech circles, tea is the new coffee, we find this nugget:

“We’ve had the Red Bulls, coffee and everything else,” Rose says of Digg, which spends about $1,000 a month just on specialty tea for employees. Rose himself favors a cup of Pu-erh imported from China’s Yunnan province after a tough day at the office.

“It’s one of those things where you want to turn to something really natural and from the Earth — and from something that isn’t going to give you a big crash,” Rose told Wired.com. “Once you start consuming tea it makes sense: This is the best of all worlds.”

This many diggs only an hour after his swearing-in announcement made the front page:

Frustrated casual Digg users, pissed off that their submissions gain no traction while the exact same submissions from power users zip by onto the front page, have launched an online petition to voice their protest. The petition has made the front page of Digg and is quickly approaching 4,000 diggs.

If you’re wondering about the power politics of Digg, you’re in luck. I’ve written two articles on the subject:

1. The politics of Digg: “But despite proclamations of its democratic community — one where a group of users works in tandem to pluck out an important news item to push to the masses — not every vote is created equal. Cohn’s link, for instance, didn’t make it to the front page simply because it led to an interesting story; the tech journalist is part of a band of elite Diggers able to consistently catapult its submissions over the threshold that separates the “upcoming” stories from the ‘popular.’”

2. Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg: “With some social sites, the law of diminishing returns means that increasing the size of the network does little to increase the power of the user. In speaking to power users on the social news site Digg, for instance, I found that the power users who are able to consistently get submissions to the front page often keep tight, closely monitored friend lists.”