According to their own site, "Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web." That, in a nutshell, is what Digg does. And there are a whole lot of companies that do the same thing, as I mentioned in Pt 1 of this post.

Another site that does a good job of explaining how stuff works said the following:


The huge Digg community is made up of users who play different, often overlapping roles. There are submitters who post news stories that they find in blogs, professional news sites and random postings around the Web. These stories land in the Digg queue. There are casual reviewers who look for interesting stuff in the queue and "Digg it" -- meaning they click a button to let Digg.com know they think it's cool. Once an article gets enough Diggs (and meets a bunch of other secret requirements), it's promoted to the homepage. There are truly dedicated reviewers who spend hours every day combing the queue to actively promote good stories and report bad stories (which will eventually get removed with enough reports against them). These people really drive what ends up on the homepage and therefore what gets thousands and thousands of people clicking through to read the story, sometimes crashing unsuspecting Web servers. Small Web sites and home servers can get crippled when 400 visitors a day suddenly turns into 5,000 in two hours. Even at HowStuffWorks, where our servers can handle the traffic, we can easily tell when we've been Dugg. When our stats show an increase over normal traffic of thousands of clicks per hour to a single article, we check the news-compilation frontrunners -- Slashdot, Fark and Digg -- to see who's got it.

And finally there are the Digg readers, who make up the majority of Digg users and reap the benefits of the willing Digg army that promotes the best stories to front page. In return, the readers keep Digg in ad revenue and give the submitters and the Diggers something to do.

Digg is the number one social bookmarking site right now, and last time I checked their Alexa rankings, they were at 89. Being closest to 1 is good, and they are way way up there. For comparison, pepsi.com ranks 36,467.

Digg helps build traffic for your site when you submit your posts. You add relevant keywords and key phrases so that when Digg.com users are searching, they will run across your site. Readers will like your article and "Digg" it. According to JohnTP's website (a site with lots of good blogging info), it can take around 50 diggs to get to the coveted front page.

And that is just one of the myriad of ways to get help from using Digg.com. Just be careful to not abuse the Digg system. Being listed as a splog (spam blog) can be distrastrous. Keep it on the up-and-up and you'll be fine.

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