The Big Digg

For those of you not familiar with digg.com (where have you been) it’s worth taking a look. Digg describes itself as ‘a user driven social content website’. Basically, this means that it is the user community of digg that determines the popularity of any content that appears there. It’s a wonderfully executed idea, everything a website of today should be and powered by the minds of millions of users worldwide.

And the collective intellect that is digg turned its gaze to the Tetsou website.

I had posted the article 7 deadly sins of email late one Sunday night. If users like an article, they ‘digg’ it; the number of diggs being an indication of an articles popularity. If they dislike an article, they ‘bury’ it. By Monday morning the Tetsou article had around 34 diggs. Not bad for a first time post.

On digg, you post the URL to the article, not the article itself. Digg creates a short extract and points the user to your site. So, with 34 diggs I was expecting some traffic by users clicking on the link to the article and visiting the site. Sure enough, I had some traffic coming through. By mid-morning the traffic to my site was growing steadily. I looked on Digg to find that the Tetsou article was growing in popularity and had achieved 120 diggs.

Now in my consulting role, I’ve worked with some large corporate organisations on both sides of the pond. So, I know that life gets busier when New York wakes up followed by the rest of the US. Emails from my New York colleagues begin to flow to my inbox and the phone starts to ring shortly after midday as the early birds make their way into the New York office.

And the collective intellect that is digg gave Tetsou its full attention.

When the phone did ring, I was expecting the dulcet tones of my Brooklyn colleague; instead, I was greeted by a rather panicked chap from south London working for my hosting provider.

‘Your site is experiencing an abnormal number of hits and we might have to take it down. It’s degrading the server you’re sharing’.

‘Crumbs!’

‘We think it’s a DOS attack’, said my London friend.

Now, I know something of Denial Of Service attacks, but I couldn’t think why anyone would want to pick on Tetsou. Not like it was an Amazon! So I asked about the traffic patterns.

‘The logs show your site has received 22,500 visits in the last hour!’

‘Crumbs!’

I looked on digg and found the answer. My Tetsou article had made the front page with 501 diggs.

‘Blimey! It’s the digg effect’.

Be Careful What You Digg For

We did our best to shore up the site, but a tsunami of hits was pounding the server and I agreed we should take it offline. I don’t blame my hosting provider – I hadn’t really optimised my site for such a large number of users. I had heard of the ‘digg effect’ from a few friends, but I never really thought it would happen to me.

I’m happy to say that Tetsou is back up and serving the article 7 deadly sins of email to a wide audience. Over the last few days some 4,500 visitors have accessed the sins. I’ve also taken time to optimise the site and Tetsou is purring along nicely. I’ve had so much feedback that I’ll be revising and expanding the article. It will be freely available to those of you who register.

And the collective mind that is digg, smiled.

Tetsou
Copyright © Tetsou 2006