URI: www.digg.com
Popularity: 1
Special Feature: User voting, digg spy, digg cloud

Why should I care:

Digg is a very popular website, articles that make it to the main page generate copious amounts of traffic. Many content creators feature technology news — Digg is the place to publish for these authors.

What you didn’t know:

To content creators, Digg offers a number of tools to integrate information from their site to yours. Digg supports quick blog posting to a number of blogging platforms including Wordpress (to blog any story within digg, simply click “blog story”). Once digg detects that you have blogged about a story, they produce a link to your website via the comment page associated with each story. You can also inlcude the current set of digg homepage items on any page you like using their javascript widget — not sure why you might want to do this though.

Digg users do not click ads. … The increased traffic will use up your bandwidth and will risk slowing down or crashing your server. In the short run, getting on the front page is more likely to cost you money than make you money… [via]

On or about March 6th, 2006, MaxPower got digged. Hammered in fact. In three days, I have whipped through nearly 25 gigs of bandwidth. A post I had written was featured on the frontpage of Digg and the Del.icio.us popular page. You can read my thoughts on this event, but the long and the short of it is that digg sent the vast majority of the traffic, and that the traffic was substantial. Can your webhost and your wordpress setup handle ‘the digg effect’?

Summary:

If you desire large amounts of traffic, you have a technology themed website or article, and the bandwidth to handle a ’slashdotting’, you should post to Digg or provide a link for your users to do so.

Required reading:

Digg vs. Slashdot
Digg Effect: The Top 10 Things Webmasters Should Know

Social Bookmarking Table of Contents