A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of having a post make it to the front page of Digg. Conincidently it was also number 1 on the Digg Popular all day (didn’t get knocked down until the first popular post on Monday) I wanted to wait a little while before writing about it because I wanted to see what the effects of being on the front page of digg would be. Here are some observations I made….

1. It did have an effect on my Alexa ranking. Now it is likely that this may be completely coincidental because by looking at the Alexa graph the traffic had been going up anyway - but there is about a 150,000 point difference in the Alexa score that I had before being Dugg and after. My initial thought was that it wouldn’t have any effect because the Digg audience tends to be very technically informed and the liklihood of them having the Alexa bar installed is smaller. This leads me to believe that Alexa has another way of tracking data.
2. The first day was good, but so were the second and third. Naturally the bulk of the traffic came in on the first day, but it only dropped by about 20% the next day. The effects of the front page view didn’t die down until about the 3rd day. From talking with a couple of other people I have found out that if I had been Dugg on a weekday that traffic would have been double what I received.
3. Social Media at work. There is almost a direct correlation to how Digg and Del.icio.us work. The main factor being speed. The post made it to the front page of Digg within 45 minutes. After that the number of people that bookmarked the site grew at about the same rate as the number of people who clicked the Digg button. If you don’t know anything else about Digg you should know that the number of Diggs doesn’t matter nearly as much as how fast it is being Dugg. Afterall it is a news site. As it turns out Del.icio.us works esseentially the same way.
4. The blogosphere effect. I think the thing I noticed that was most interesting was the how the traffic changed as time passed. The first day 99% of the traffic came either from Digg or Del.icio.us. This is easiest to tell by the comments on the first day. They were made primarily by people commenting on the list or asking that something be added. After the first day nearly all the comments were trackbacks. The traffic data supports this. A good portion of the traffic on days 2, 3 and 4 came from people who originated on another blog that had a trackback to my original post. The point I am trying to make here is that the trackbacks helped support the traffic once the post fell off the front page of Digg and Del.icio.us. Sidenote: The post was also added to the social surfing site StumbleUpon. Now I don’t know what effect a site like StumbleUpon could have on traffic if people really like it, but it would make an interesting item to track.
5. I avoided the dreaded Slashdot effect. My blog (powered by Wordpress) actually did very well performance wise. No really big blips in performance. A lot of people have had their sites crash by being Slashdotted or Dugg. Of course it was a weekend and I may not have gotten the full force of being Dugg.

Those are just some of my observations. If you have any questions let me know.