I had some articles queued up to post over the week that I had written while the DNS was getting resolved, and I posted one each day for 5 consecutive days. Somehow each and every one of those reached the homepage of Digg.com. For a fact I know at least 1 of those weren't worthy of Digg homepage status (and Digg users expressed their disapproval), but hey, what could I do, I wasn't the one submitting the stories. It was a thrilling week, not so much from all the traffic I received, but from all the emails I received from people thanking me and letting me know they gained something from reading my blog.
Description:
Glenn Wolsey defines, by some standards, the potential of modern web
success. Glenn is a 15 year old budding designer and technology enthusiast.
His future in technology, became clear in 2005 (at the ripe age of
13) when he took home 1st place in the New Zealand Web challenge.
Glenn now maintains a successful blog, Glennwolsey.com and
writes for New Zealand’s Mac Magazine. Glenn’s Blog does not receive
gigantic, “Tech Crunch” traffic, but maintains a consistent 50,000
monthly visitors; a phenomenal number for a 15 year old.
"Digg Factor"
The definitive standard referred to earlier is the Digg factor. Wolsey,
after moving to the (gs) Grid-Service, had a taste of the newest
form of web rock-stardom in the form of a Digg. Getting “Dugg” entails
the posting of your product launch, blog article or video on the
front page of Digg.com.
Featured Digg pieces are “Dugg” by thousands of Digg members. The
more “Diggs” a piece gets, the further toward the front page the
piece moves and the more traffic the site will receive.
Getting Dugg often results in a site being shut down or simply crashing do to the traffic and load surge that accompanies this phenomena. Most typical shared hosting set ups are not able to handle massive load surge without creating a problem for neighboring clients on a shared server.
Since January '07 to the time of this writing, Glenn's blog posts have made it to the Digg.com front page 8 times.