Charting Your Success on Digg

Everyone who uses Digg regularly knows all about sites that go down because of the “Digg Effect”. It is almost inevitable that limited bandwidth hosting will be overwhelmed by the sudden surge of traffic reaching the Digg front page can bring. Duggmirror tries to cache sites as they hit the big time and so provides a backup for those who really must see the latest Dugg nuggets on Wii, Macs and Linux system mods (oh, and the other fascinating news stories this so-called social media site brings up).

In addition to the Digg mirror (which is independent of Digg itself) there is Duggtrends.com, which is much more fun than simply visiting the article being Digged. With Duggtrends you can watch from a distance as traffic builds up on the poor, unfortunate blog that got Dugg. So, how do you get to the Duggtrends view?

The general format is easy, you simply use http://duggtrends.com/digggraph.aspx?diggurl=http://digg.com/the_category_wot_it_is_in/the_article_link_slug to display the main trend pertaining to a particular Digged article.

Here are a couple of examples from Digg items that caught my attention while writing this:

Dawkins Dugg - as you can see, hits gradually climbed over the course of six hours or so and then spiked. From this page you can get to the original Digg and comments, see that 219 users Dugg this article, and a little more.

With less than half the Diggs of the Dawkins item, this one about subtropical storm Andrea, shows the same steady climb and spikes at about half the visitor rate.

The trend on this one is very different, a much more shallow climb then a bumpy ascent to the big time, which at the time of writing does not appear to have spiked but is gradually topping out.

It will be interesting to come back in a few days and see whether these Duggtrend graphs have changed much. Anyone care to comment on whether I should be spending my time worrying about more important matters, please use the form below to voice your concerns.