Our Digg Genesis

We started off reading and "digging" stories from our favorite RSS feeds and quickly moved to posting some of our own writing. "Uh oh," you say, "bad blogger."

No, not really. For three reasons:

• It's not against the TOS at digg
• As our readers will know, we don't have a spam blog in any way
• It had it's own punishment in terms of public yawning at our posts

Because we are very interesting writers (*cough*) but not to the digg crowd and certainly not on every post. Our first 40 postings averaged 3 diggs each. I swear, you could scan your BK receipt, post it to "offbeat" and get more diggs than that.

But, not being totally oblivious, I started reading some articles on how all this stuff worked (or how people thought it worked!) and our average over the next 10 stories doubled to 6 diggs/story. Whoo, hoo, if we were a startup we'd have been worth $1B by then!

After a bit more attention over the next 10 stories we bumped our average to 24 diggs/story. From there our average over the next 15 stories went to 45 diggs/story.

Any my last story finally got "popular" and got 700+ diggs by this article.

Now, lest you assume I was spending my entire life on this, well, uh, no. I did around 70 stories over 7 months, or a couple per week. I was spending a lot more time digging (2,000+) stuff. A lot of that was shouts but a lot more was stuff I found by looking for people submitting stories with keywords I cared about.

So, to summarize, rocky start but a good strong finishing position, pretty good citizen. Maybe I give myself a B+, which would make Digg better than High School, in retrospect.

The Landmine Tripped

Not by anything I did outside the TOS, nor by a flame war, and not even by some self proclaimed Digg guardian. Nope, some sockpuppet knocked our blog out of bounds for Digg.

I posted a digg (Best. Digg. Shout. Ever.) about an absurd shout I got from a user called SteJules. I won't go into details but he'd been a Digg member for 31 days and had over 10K diggs and had a 20% hot rate. The shout was 800+ words and was priceless. It just begged for digging and though I was careful not to be ad hominem about it, I figured since he'd sent it to around a thousand people, I posted it. And it got 100+ votes in two days.

And it got our site banned by SteJules and his friends. Which is a long and boring story, but they did it on purpose by going back through posts from months before and burying them as spam. Nice.

Banning is Forever

Which is when I discovered that there is NO appeals process. You know how blogger will lock you out or require a captchya to post? Annoying but after a few days it usually gets put right. Google gives you a penalty, you can fix that in a few weeks. But no such process exists at Digg. (I actually have friends who know the guys what run Digg but you don't call in favors for stuff like that. Which makes it worse, actually.)

Being Innocent is No Protection

Oh, you say, you don't submit your own site and other people only do it sometimes. Well, what if someone creates a user, says that their home page is your domain, and starts, once a day, submitting your stories. After a few weeks they get their friends to swarm them and mark them as spam.

Bye-bye.

Diversify

Look, our business model does not require that we get traffic from Digg, but if it did, we'd be toast. We'll, we'd be toast unless we wanted to change our domain name, 301 redirect hundreds of pages, etc. And even then the "breathing space" only last until some other sock puppet bully gets you banned. So diversify into other social media sites. There are a lot of them, and if you read the articles under our "niche social media" tag you'll get a flavor for what is out there. In the meantime, while being a model citizen is smart, it certainly won't protect you.

I've been having a right proper geek fest with Excel, PivotTables, and the output from our Social Heartbeat Monitor of 2,000+ Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites.

Actually, that was hard to type as my hands are kind of cramping up.

I'm still pondering what this all means, and it'll get a lot more interesting when we start having week-on-week data. But here are some interesting graphs....

PageRank and Live Count

As you may recall, we looked at over 2,000 sites and found the ones that were "live" - they loaded, they at least looked like they were having some social activity, etc.

So here is the total pagerank distribution - and it's interesting to me how many middle pagerank (if you can call a PR5 middle!) social sites there are.

But this is only interesting to the point where you can see what is live.   Remeber that not-live includes stuff that does not load, linkfarms, obviously dead sites, etc, etc.

So, fear not, fifteen seconds with my trusty Excel and you get:

Quite a spread - you are much more likely to have non-live sites towards the bottom, but can you imagine a PR9 site that is linkbait or a personal blog or something?

Actually, it was half.com, which used to (if you're old enough to remember) have all sorts of things not related to selling and buying. Thanks, Meg, for all the fish.

I Feel The Need for Speed

Quick explanation: pageload is the time it takes to load the home page of a site from our server in lovely cari.net. I rounded all the times to the nearest whole number so 1 second is really 0.5 through 1.49. It is a relative measure, so that should be fine.

And what we see is, well, it's all ove the board, but can you imagine a 7 second load on a PR10 website? That was the Annotea project at w3.org. A-freaking-mazing.

Sad Sad Man

Yes, I am, and it is because I love stuff like this.

What interesting stuff are you guys pulling out of this? We've had scores of downloads - many more than we thought for something so, so, so of interest to SEO type people. (And thanks for all the kind emails!)

We're taking down the downloadable list of 2,162 social bookmarking and networking sites and replacing it with an interactive analytical tool that gives you a lot more information and display control. It will let you see the heartbeat for any social bookmarking or networking site. Thus, in a fit of imagination, we called this the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™.

(Plus it is much much cooler than a google doc and you can get the list directly as a "csv" file.)

Things you can find out

We've built some controls around a grid so that you can filter the list of 2,000 plus social bookmarking and social networking sites down into the sublist you're probably most interested in. By my watch it is between 30% to 70% faster than google docs. (Attention google: my technical staff is better than yours!)

We added the kinds of controls that will help you find something specific:

• You want PR5 or better Live Sites? No problem, there are 534 of them.
• Sites that are live but between PR2 and PR4 with >1,000 pages indexed in google? 403 of them.
• Insert your question here....

But most importantly, we introduced the idea of a heartbeat for each site.

Heartbeat?

It's great to have a big list, and it's even handy to have a "Live" indicator so that you know that sometime in the last two months I was able to use the site in an appropriate fashion (create user, login, post). But we're including what we call heartbeat information:

• Pages indexed in Yahoo/MSN and what-is-their-name, oh, yeah, Google
• Backlink count for Yahoo/MSN/Google
• Load time

We'll be keeping this information on a weekly basis for each site so that you can track a site over time. And, because we really believe in making this information widely useful, you'll be able to download the performance over time.

Made for Custom Analysis

For example, Mixx is getting huge buzz right now in the SEO community and has 133K pages indexed in google. Does anyone (outside Mixx) have any idea what that was last week? You'll know in a week if you come back.

To put it even more in perspective, Digg has 9.8M pages indexed and Dogster has 134K pages. Dogster? Yep, it's exactly what you think it is. But both Dogster and Mixx are PR6 sites with similar google love. Where should you be putting your funny dog stories? (Trick question, the answer is both digg and dogster, wtih mixx in third place if you have time!)

Do you find that your stories do better on PR4 sites or PR8 sites? Do you want traffic or links? Now you have to consider.....

Tribal Knowledge vs. Experimentation

Well, we know all about long tail search and long tail e-tailing and long tail PPC campaigns, etc, etc. And there are even a few of us talking about niche sites versus huge volume general sites (ex: Digg vs. VOIPigg) but you know, it's all been logic, supposition, and educated guesses.

At Promote-My-Site we've written about getting a diversified portfolio of social bookmarking and social networking sites. So we started thinking about analyzing sites - how many backlinks, what is their PageRank, what is the change over time, etc. It's all obvious stuff to want to know, but except for traffic share changes for the "big 10" you can't really get any of that. For free anyway. And you certainly won't get that easily downloadable.

No longer. Now you can experiment using our Social Heartbeat Monitor ™. Find sites that are in your specialty, look at smaller but still high value sites (there are a ton), re-post some of your greatest hits. Once you find a combination that works and gives you good ROI, find more sites like it using our filters.

Calling All New Sites

We spend an astounding number of hours pulling lists from the internet and came up with 2,000 to look at. Yesterday I got emails about three new ones. We'll be constantly adding things to the list and we'll give you a way to find "what's new." You can also easily suggest new sites right from the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page.

Time Will Tell

We believe that a social bookmark and network heartbeat will be a valuable tool for looking at the change over time of a social networking or social bookmarking site. We think you'll enjoy it and find it useful to build a portfolio of performing social network and bookmarking sites.

In my last article about Google possibly punishing Digg I contrasted Digg versus a niche pligg site, VOIPigg. And I noted that you might too casually dismiss VOIPigg:

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or VOIPigg?

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit to both Digg and VOIPigg, so obviously Digg is a better use of your time.

I should have been clearer - it was meant sarcastically. You have to do both.

Traffic versus Readers

Look, because Digg gets an order of magnitude more traffic than VOIPigg doesn't mean you wouldn't be better off at the niche social networking site.

Of the 100 people showing up every day on VOIPigg approximately how many are there to read VOIP articles? Right, 100%.

Of the bazillion people at Digg how many are there to read VOIP? And how will they easily find your content?

Digg Friend Finder

Well, you could use our Digg Friend Finder and find the (currently) 158 people who have submitted on VOIP. And friend them. And then find the people voting on those stories and friend them too.

But, really, you should do both, if you want a diversified portfolio of readers and a diversified reputation.

[Ok, read this post, it's a doozy, but before you go download this list, you should check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor . Look left. Yep, there it is. You might also want to read this article on why we built it to replace the file discussed here.]

About six months ago we started looking at social networks. Not just the top tier sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc, but the second and third tiers as well. There are a truly huge number of social network sites out there. Almost every niche has at least one if not many sites devoted to it.

For example, take Memeza. It's a Pligg site for Zambian news. You might think that's pretty small and insignificant, but if you've got a story that would be of interest to Zambians it only takes 2 votes to get to the top page.

It's PR 4. Think of how that might be useful.

A lot of Sites Out There

There seem to be lots of different lists of of social network sites. The lists usually have numbers of sites in double digits. We've scoured the web for everything we could find. Every time we found an article along the lines of "Here are 18 social networking sites you should know about" we added those sites to our list.

We've researched 2,162 social nework sites. Here's how they break down:

A Present For You

We've put the entire list up on Google Docs as the Promote My Site Social Network and Bookmark MegaList V18. Here's a snapshot of the first few rows to entice you to go download the document.

More than just a list of names of social network sites, we've also included the URL and Domain so you can dedupe it against your own lists, as well as a status as of last week and our comments. If we get enough interest we'll put together an application so that people can query the database.

We thought about making this premium content, but compared to the stuff we're working on for premium, a raw list of social networking sites just doesn't cut it. We hope you'll keep an eye on us for when we start releasing the premium tools.

[Remember, check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor. and this article to explain why we built it.]