Bloggasm

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.”

Just spotted this on a friend’s submission. Not sure how I feel about it. So far Digg’s recommendation features have been somewhat of a flop, mostly because people often reciprocate diggs and digg content they’re not all that interested in in the first place: