Guess what… I’m still here! This is the third time Webomatica has dealt with the Digg effect. Here’s my obligatory “dugg” post, with some info-porn graphics like last time.

In this case, my post The Best And Worst Bond Films was submitted by someone else (richstyles [thanks!]), so I didn’t have much prep time. I noticed the submission while checking out my Feedburner feed - as shows a little graphic noting the number of diggs on a post - when it was around 25 diggs. This is a good number at which to start paying attention.

From my experience, when a story moves past about 50 diggs, its fate is sealed. It moves onto the front page of its subject category and then dudes just start visiting your site and digging like crazy.

Duggmirror is a handy site to visualize this. Here’s a nice graph of the digging activity over time. From here, it’s pretty obvious that the story hit a critical point at about 50 diggs, then the chart just goes up, and levels off around 600.

My other two posts topped out at about 800 diggs. This one seemed to hit its peak at about 600. It wasn’t as popular a post as the ones previous, although it did garner more page views - as my site went down the last two times.

I think many diggers didn’t agree with my choices for best and worst Bond films. Many seemed to mention A View To A Kill as a terrible Bond film that should have been on my worst list. But hey, this is just an opinion on my blog. I feel that I did my homework. I watched the films, wrote reviews, and considered them in comparison to one another. Believe me, The Living Daylights is a superior film after you’ve watched A View To A Kill, Moonraker, and Octopussy in short succession.

That said, I’m totally open and interested in different opinions and points of view. I received some decent discussion about my choices in the comments, and that’s all I can really hope for as a blogger.

Although, naturally, some comments on digg and this blog were pretty crassly humorous. The list was called terrible, bullshit, and my parents labelled sexual deviants. One poster who agreed with me was told to marry someone in Massachusetts and adopt “wrong children” by another digger. Still, regarding my last dugg post about Apple mistakes I was told I had Steve Jobs’ **** in my mouth, so just about anything is a step up.

Insults and nutty comments aside, my biggest worry was whether the site would crap out. Since my last digging in October, I installed WordPress 2.1 and WP-Cache, the latter of which did an awesome job. This blog survived the hordes hoping for Xenia Onatopp photographs. I suggest anybody who is tempting the digg effect to install it (the plug in, not Xenia).

The traffic was pretty intense for a few hours (at least as far as my blog is concerned), and at day’s end the server had handled about 25,000 unique visitors, 33,000 page views, 700,000 hits, and 6.77 GB (this is all in one day… not a monthly total!). That’s essentially 3x the amount of traffic sustained during my last digging. Also, my Feedburner subscribers jumped to 200 - double what it was before.

Truth be told, as with last time, I’m fully expecting all this to die down rapidly as things go back to normal. What I’m hoping for as a result are a few more regular readers and another nice spike on my Alexa chart so I can look back and think… good times.

Note: It’s now a day and a half later - the digg traffic has dropped considerably, but there’s some residual traffic that I didn’t see with my apple posts - from StumbleUpon, and two news sites in Europe.

I thank George Lazenby for WP-Cache and that my agreement with my hosting provider (Site5) includes unlimited bandwidth. Meanwhile, the best is yet to come: I have yet to post The Seven Hottest Bond Women and How To Quit Smoking With Kirk And Spock.

Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.

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