This has been covered several times already, but I thought it was worth mentioning again since a number of popular Digg posts have been afflicted with the curse of the “Digg effect” recently.

There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing your server throw a 403 forbidden error right when you hit the front page (as its not the ideal way to greet your tens of thousands of new visitors).

Assuming your host is not completelty useless, there’s a very easy fix for this: install the wp-cache plugin. Be sure to get version 2 of the wp-cache plugin. I’ve had 1.0 give me problems on the latest WordPress versions, so go with 2.0 (especially if your installation is newish). Unzip it to your plugins folder and activate it.

Make sure it’s enabled under options > wp-cache.

To be sure it’s working, go to any page on your site, refresh it, and view the page’s source code. At the bottom you should see something like this:

-- Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.477 seconds --
-- Cached page served by WP-Cache --

If you do, the caching page is working properly. In my experience sometimes you have to disable and re-enable the plugin to make sure it’s working right. Also, sometimes there’s a delay in when it starts caching. Thirdly, keep in mind that your browser might be caching the page as well, so restart your Firefox or IE-explorer to be sure.

Now next time you write a good post, just make sure your wp-cache plugin is working.

If you’re curious why this makes such a big difference, here’s the quick (and possibly slightly innacurate) lowdown on what this plugin does: it caches a version of each page (takes a snapshot and stores it as a static file) and serves that one to visitors so every new visitor does not make your wordpress run a bunch of mysql database queries. If you don’t cache and get 12 visitors per second (coming from Digg, Reddit, etc.) your server and database will get overwhelmed and crash.

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huh?

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This Thursday I wrote an post for Center Networks called “Dear Kevin Rose, Please Create a Photo Section” which was an ad-hoc petition to gauge support for the suggestion. The Digg received over 6,600 votes (and counting). Kevin Rose himself added a cryptic comment to the Digg: “hmm :)” (which received 400+ thumbs up). Friday Techcrunch picked up this story and also linked to the post.

I went through and read almost all of the comments on Digg, Center Networks, and Techcrunch – I was interested to see people reactions and commentary. Some of the users had great suggestions of their own – particularly about grouping the photos into either an art section or consolidating everything into a media category.

The main reason I want to see this change is that I don’t like seeing (often relatively mediocre) photos on the home page. But many Digg users do like seeing photography (judging by the number of diggs that photos receive).

After having some time to digest this, I think a separate Media section would be the best option – and I’d like to see a part of it on the home page, but separated from the main news section. This way you would have your popular stories, your top 10, and a block (perhaps above the top 10) with thumbnails for the top 3-5 videos and photos. Some people might think that it would create clutter, but having what I describe as the default would probably suit most users.

I also think we’re going to see a move towards more personalization on Digg, which will allow users to setup exactly what they want to see and allow them to arrange whatever sections interest them. Google is moving in this direction, so why wouldn’t Digg?

It doesn’t look like the podcasts feature has taken off as much – it’s a static list, which doesn’t really fit well into the “Digg culture”. They could add the podcasts into this media section as well.

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‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

Yes, I am whoring out Shakespeare for effect, but I’m hardly the first. I really want to chime in on this “Is Linkbait bad – to be or not to be” discussion that’s been going as of late. The main facets being discussed are: A. Is linkbait badly named? B. Is linkbait bad? and C. Does linkbait drive bad traffic?

Yes, no, and no. Now you can go on with your day.

…

…OK, so I guess I’ll elaborate. For those who don’t know linkbait is, check out Wikipedia’s entry (this link nofollowed for those paying attention) or better yet SEOmoz’s definition or Todd’s definitive guide to linkbait.

At its core, linkbait is a compelling piece of content that catches people’s attention – most often it’s associated with social media sites that promote and aggregate interesting or useful articles, such as Digg, and Reddit. So let’s address the questions currently being asked in the blogo-tubes.

A. Is linkbait a bad term?

Yes and no. The nice thing about the term is that it’s fairly self-explanatory to the layperson. Bait suggests that it is something that catches (people’s attention in this case). However, as is the case with language in general, the term bait posesses certain connotations, which are arguably negative. The consumer of “bait” is typically someone who is “lured” unwittingly. Ex: roach, rat, perhaps a delicious bass. Most people don’t want to be the “baitees” of anything, especially not Digg’ers, so when they hear that word, they react negatively to it.

B. Is linkbait bad?

Abolutely not. I don’t understand the obtuse logic of people who denounce linkbait. They are essentially “intent police” – people making judgements not based on merit and usefulness of content, but rather the intent of the author beyond face value of the post. If people Digg, bookmark, and share a piece that they find personal value in, I don’t care whether it was written by accident (organically) or with the intent to be useful with the hope that it gets noticed and linked.

Does it really matter if the “25 ways to refinance your college debt” is written by a mortgage company? The criteria should ALWAYS be “do people find this useful?” Do we really need to regulate and try to determine the intent? If something is blatant self promotion, people will be quick to catch on. I think you have to have faith in your audience that they will be able to pick out the peanuts from the poop.

C. Does linkbait drive bad traffic?

Certain SEO’s and online marketers decry Digg traffic as “a flash in a pan that doesn’t convert”. Smarter marketers know that true value of successful linkbait lies in links and exposure. The more people read your piece, the more people are likely to blog about it, link to it, pass it on to friends, which then filters through. It’s the butterfly effect at work.

There are two pieces of linkbait that have propelled this blog to where it stands now. Yahoo shows 5,900+ links coming into this blog as a result of the butterfly effect set off by these 2 pieces of linkbait (mostly) that resonated with people and spread throughout the web. It would take a long time to develop those links using a link ninja, so the benefits of linkbait to linkbuilding cannot be denied. We live in an attention economy – positive attention gives you more relevance, which gives you more exposure, which allows you to become more relevant.

In essence, linkbait is just a term for “great content”. Social networks are now the sticks of dynamite that propel that great content to new heights and expose it to more people than ever before. Most times this results in links. So really linkbait is no different (and no more nefarious) than its traditioanl equivalents in the offline world – a great recipe that gets passed around, that damn Geico lizard that sell a lot of insurance policies, and anything else that resonates with enough people that they then discuss it, share it, and link to it, whether its intent was commercial or not.

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Yesterday Jason Calcanis gave a keynote speech at SES where he stirred up quite a bit of controversy. I still can’t decide if he’s a pompous asshat who creates controversy by virtue of his own ignorace or a brilliant marketer who stirs the pot intentionally to create buzz. Either way, he is once again the center of attention. Allen at CenterNetworks has the audio (I’m always very impressed by Allen’s coverage of events) of Jason’s speech so you can judge by yourself.

At one point Jason Calacanis said “SEO is bullshit” which offended quite a few people. Call me old fashioned but I think it’s kind of disrespectful to insult an entire room of people (this is after all, a “search engine strategies” conference). If you listen to his speech, you’ll quickly realize that he is VERY ignorant about the field of SEO. He unfairly characterizes the entire SEO field as a snake oil business. He might as well have said that anyone who uses email marketing is a spammer. Blanket characterization of an industry is plain ignorant.

Later in the speech he talked about using editors at Netscape to weed out spam. (Netscape is basically a bad copy of Digg). Well at Digg, it works like this – if people find value in the post, they digg it. If they think it’s spam, they bury it. It’s a democratized system and the funny/helpful/useful submissions make it to the front page. What Calcanis is basically saying is, “I think the users at Netscape are too stupid to figure out what’s spam, so we’ll tell them.” He gives an example for “25 Refinancing Tips” as being obvious spam. But Jason, what if these tips are actually useful enough to a majority of the people? It’s really arrogant to assume that you know best and shows a real lack of respect for your users.

I personally think Jason Calcanis cannot see past his own ego and really has very little respect for anyone other than Jason Calacanis.

Oh, and before you call me out, yes the interspersed misspelling of Jason’s last name is intentional. After all, spelling is bullshit. Much like SEO.

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I’ve been looking at the traffic stats from this week’s Digg spike in our logs. Here are some observations about the 21,000 visits we’ve received so far:

BROWSERS

• 64.42% use Firefox
• 20.02% use IE
• 9.82% Safari
• 3.11% Opera

PLATFORMS

• 75.92% Windows
• 18.69% Mac
• 5.06% Linux

SCREEN RESOLUTIONS

• 30.83% 1280 x 1024
• 27.15% 1024 x 800
• Less than 1.5% use 800X600 or lower

About 40 to 45 % have Flash 9+ installed. Digg drove a little more than half of all traffic within the last 3 days with the following break down: Day 1 – 72% of traffic, Day 2 – 31% of traffic, Day 3 – 21% of traffic. So basically Digg is like a giant filter that feeds out to the rest of the web/blogosphere, since now we have a ton of referrers.

These stats are definitely from the web crowd and are SOOO different than the stats I see on “normal” non-tech-focused websites (you know, the ones outside our echo-chamber – the ones visited by the people who make up the rest of the 95% of the population.)

For instance, Firefox penetration usually runs around 15% for other sites I’ve monitored – generally between 6% and 25%. Also, 5% of Linux users is quite high compared to 0.10% to 0.5% that I usually see.

The lesson: know your specific audience, look at your stats and don’t generalize. Averages are dangerous.

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