Comcast Hacked – Digg Story Submission Influence
Digg May 29th, 2008Word’s out that Comcast was hacked last night. I guess it serves them right for “throttling activities“. What this means precisely I don’t know but I’m guessing that the download speeds for torrent related activities probably had a governor placed on them.
This is a great bit of media that fits the Digg demographic perfectly. Apparently there are loads of other people who think the same thing. If we go to Digg and search for stories submitted with the word ‘Comcast’ in the title and sort by newest submissions first, we can see who’s submitting this story, who was the first, and who’s received the most Diggs so far. In the image below, the submission with 10 Diggs was the first person to break this story on Digg. But even though they were the first, they’re obviously not the most successful. The story right above it has 39 Diggs, probably because it is accompanied by an image. Two submissions up from that has 32 Diggs, note the word HACKED is capitalized.
So what’s this telling us? It really doesn’t matter when the story was submitted, what matters is the way in which the title was written, the amount of apparent information you use to support your submission, and your influence within the network. So when submitting, maybe a good acronym to remember would be TRI:
- Title
- References
- Influence
May 29th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I’m not even sure the title has a lot to do with it. Many folks I know that utilize digg get their network(s) to digg the story as well. If you’ve got a great site with a lot of visitors, hanging a digg widget on there can carry a lot of weight as well.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
@Douglas The title has everything to do with it. If your content’s good enough and the title is sticky enough then you won’t have to leverage your friends for help in promoting the story. The Digg badge makes it look as though you’re trying too hard. More often than not, it’s better to leave the Digg badge off.