Dave Naffziger's Blog

I had a blog post reach the front page of Digg, and then after 630 Diggs had it buried. At the time it was buried, it had the most votes on the front page (I should have taken a screenshot). The post hit the front page in under an hour, requiring only about 30 Diggs (it was a Saturday morning).

The post stirred some controversy as it implied non-altruistic motives of some Top Diggers. I didn’t think the post was that controversial, but it definitely hit a few nerves. I followed the buried post up with a profile of one Digger and the impact he had on a site that he Dugg 147 times over the last 60 days. That post was on its way to the front page (15 Diggs in 2 hours), but was also buried.

A few interesting tidbits:

• 39 Diggs after the bury. After the post was buried, it received 39 Diggs in the subsequent 24 hours – enough to hit the first page (on a weekend). This truly speaks to the power of the friend effect. The only way that Diggers could find the story was through the profile pages of their friends.
• 14,097 Unique users. No doubt would have been higher had the post not been buried – the traffic from Digg had mostly disappeared after the story was buried.
• 630 new feed subscribers recorded by Feedburner. These don’t seem to actually represent subscribers though. We’ll see how that number looks several days later.
• 32 new inbound blog links were picked up by Technorati. I’m sure the actual number of inbound links is higher. I’ll check that number in the search engines in a few weeks.
• 4 new Digg friends. I’m just understanding the social side of Digg and I have to admit it is pretty cool. I love that Digg stands alone without the social side, but it becomes even more compelling as you get sucked in.

My biggest takeaway is that controversy may work in the blogosphere, but it doesn’t work on Digg.

Update 1:
Technorati inbound links updated from 20 to 32.