In a nutshell, Digg is a social bookmarking website, with a twist. It’s a place to share stuff which you have found online with others, and to discover what other’s have Dugg. Everything and anything can be Dugg (except those which are NFSW) so long as it is submitted. So how does this affect us?
Well, as readers, you can see the interaction between Digg users. For a social bookmarking website, it’s pretty uncommon. Digging an article makes it more popular, and hence more people will notice it. They will tend to start to write comments about that article which may or may not agree with everyone, creating a little bit of controversy. And since there’s no such thing as bad publicity, that article will probably reach the front page of Digg.com, and handing that site what is called the ‘Digg effect’ – which essentially means that it is so heavily Dugg until the server crashes.
If you like reading your routine webpages, that’s fine. But if you want to explore the Web and its content, it’s difficult to do it alone. Digg helps you in that way by just browsing through the sites which other people find deserves a submission.
To the webmaster, this means several things. Firstly and rightly the most important, is popularity. The more traffic you bring to your site, the higher the chances of getting more frequent returning visitors, which in turn increases the chances of the articles to get Dugg. And the cycle repeats itself. Revenue also increases by means of advertisements. If advertisers know that a site gets a lot of traffic, they would want to invest in an ad spot, providing the webmaster the means to generate a higher income. That means he can now spend more money to pay writers for higher quality content and probably make some enhancements to the site e.g. transfer to a faster, more reliable server, hiring web-designers to brush up the place etc.
As a writer, I can tell you that Digg does a lot of my ego. It feels nice to have my articles Dugg. I even appreciate the occasional bad comments because those are the ones which create controversy. Not only that, it motivates me to write articles which are actually worthy to submit to Digg.com. And most websites do pay their writers a bonus if their articles are heavily Dugg, so that’s another motivation! However, that’s not the point.
Digg provides reader-webmaster interaction. It allows the webmaster to know which are the sort of articles the readers like on the site, so that we can focus on writing about those subjects. We wouldn’t want to waste our time and yours by writing something which you don’t want to read.
So please, dear readers, gather the Digg spirit and start digging here at Kongtechnology. Creating an account over at Digg.com isn’t difficult and only takes a minute. But in return, you will see that it’s much more fun to have some interaction on this site.