If you've never heard of Digg, it's a popular social bookmarking/user submitted news site. Users submit links and other users can 'Digg it' (+1 point) if they liked it and bury it (-1 point) if they don't. The front page of Digg.com lists the hottest upcoming stories at that moment. As a story gets more Diggs, it is more prominently featured, and you get a snowball effect with more and more users flocking to that story.

It's a little more complicated than that, because Digg uses a super secret algorithm which gives votes different weights depending on the user's history - but it's a lot easier to think of it just in terms of +1/-1. This snowball of traffic has been coined the "Digg effect" and can lead to some smaller websites being knocked offline due to hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously trying to connect to a website per second!. The Digg effect is great free advertising, and professional bloggers (:rolleyes:) love the Digg effect because it drives massive amounts of new readers to their content. Previously, there were even websites that for a fee, promised to get your story to the front page of Digg. These services utilized organized rings of Digg users, and would pay them to Digg certain stories. The Digg algorithm has since been tweaked and is supposedly no longer affected by these rings. Due to weighting of votes by the algorithm, it's no longer just the number of Diggs a story gets, but instead it's a complex mix of variables that no one outside of the company really knows. ANYHOW, I submitted a story yesterday about VLC which is a popular alternative to Windows Media Player. I was really surprised to find my story on the front page this evening! Especially since I didn't advertise it, or send it to anyone. I really don't know how it happened. When I noticed it, there were about 180 Diggs. It's off the front page now, but it'll be interesting to see how many it ends up getting. You can keep track by looking at the Digg counter below. The inner geek in me is happy today - I've been Dugg!