“The result is that automated systems for finding, indexing and searching tags across multiple sites such as Del.icio.us and Technorati will continue to become less valuable, because they deal with ever greater levels of noise.”
My feeling is that tagging really takes a back seat to exposure time. Yes, you may get search traffic or delayed traffic from good tagging, but the most important traffic pours in right after the post is created (assuming you have strong, regular viewership or at least good promotion).
This got me thinking about Digg articles and how “here today, gone tomorrow” they are. According to Digg.com itself:
“New submissions live in the Upcoming section for between 12-24 hours, depending on the popularity of the topic they fall under. After 12-24 hours, if the story has not been promoted to the homepage (become popular), it falls out of the queue.”
Clearly, death comes quickly to unpopular items but what about the popular ones? Here are the Top 15 Articles of the Past 7 Days as of Wed., 6/6/07 at 11AM. I went back to see what happened to those articles today (Friday 6/15/07, 9 days later) at 11AM to note any changes.
None of these articles can be found on Digg.com anymore without some diligent searching, and, obviously, none of them are still in the Top 15. Note: I view “active days” as the time between when the story is posted and when it receives its last comment. Without active discussion, the stories tend to die off rather quickly.
A few things to take away from this:
1) Headlines ARE EVERYTHING. No surprises there. All of these stories have pretty tantalizing (and human!) titles to them. Even items like the AACS Processing Key were titled to grab the target audience’s attention.
2) The average active lifespan for these articles was 6.2 days. It’s probably safe to say that the average lifespan of a popular Digg article is around a week.
3) These Top 15 items received an average of 1412 diggs per day. If you’ve got a Digg fan club, expect something comparable for your super sweet article.
So does that mean that Digg users are dumber than goldfish? Probably not, but it is hard to find an old article if you didn’t Digg it initially. SEOmoz points out that if you’re really looking for a traffic spike post a link in one of the first comments on a Dugg article. As a closer, I’ll leave you with a nice Digg success story. Can Digg really save the rain forest?
Ron Sansone
IAOC Member
PS – If anyone knows where I can get some solid information on Digg population data and user frequency, please pass it my way.