Anatomy of a Digg

Meta-note: Updating on the weekends is for losers!

So I wrote a recap of the season finale of Lost on Wednesday. It was entirely unplanned, as I don’t normally recap that show. It’s generally bad and just makes me angry. But since this particular episode was very good, I decided I’d comment on it.

And, because I’m always a bit of a whore, I submitted it to digg. I didn’t expect much to come of it.

The next morning, I woke up to 700 diggs. Over the course of the day, that number rose to almost 2,000 diggs. It also brought in over 21,000 unique visitors, 30,000 pageviews, over one hundred new RSS subscribers, more one-day advertising revenue than I have ever seen and a 70-post comment thread that degenerated into quite the flamewar early on.

This is the second time this has happened and, once again, I was entirely unprepared for it. When my Top 10 Nintendo Romances article made the front page I was on my way to New York City. Erin and I watched the diggs roll-in (and the server go down) at the airport bar in Buffalo.

This time was similar, though less geographically interesting. My second great digg success came at the same time as I needed to take in about four long business meetings in a two-day span, taking me to Ontario towns as varied as Guelph and Waterloo. At one, I was able to pull my laptop out, and pretend to take notes as I refreshed the site. That was fairly dangerous, though — had someone noticed, the explanation would have taken hours.

All in all, though, I have no regrets. Did I capitalize on the burst of traffic? Not really. But I don’t really want be to be the premiere spot for Lost-watching on the internet. Rather, I kind of see it as a place for Erin and I to post long, rambling and creative posts about whatever it is we’re being entertained by (or not entertained by, which seems to be more common these days) currently. It’s a feature/opinion site, not a news site, and as such I don’t think it’ll ever update at the kind of frequency that the blogosphere demands.

It’s a good site, though. You should visit! Been on digg twice and everything.