Getting a front page digg can be a godsend to the new webmaster. You’re guaranteed tens of thousands of visitors, and if your dugg page is any good, hundreds of backlinks. I got my site dugg in the second week with my article on defeating censorship, and had 50,000 pageviews and 400 backlinks by the end of that week. That’s gold right there.

I’ve found a few ways to game the digg system. In no particular order, here are the best ways to make sure your submission makes it to the front page:

1. Use the Digg Effect on Itself - I don’t know why, but Digg allows you to post a link to another upcoming Digg article in front page comments. Utilize the thousands of visitors to a new post to get your own out there. If your article is relevant to the discussion you’ll make it to the front page too, but if it isn’t you’ll at least get another 10 or so diggs.
2. Comment on Your Own Submission - Posting comments on your own article submission is a great way to get a couple more people to look at your submission. It’s tough to keep getting Diggs after your initial few hours. Comments make sure people watching Digg spy at least see your title.
3. Use Powerful Headlines - This is the most important rule for Digg and for blogging generally. The more shocking or grabbing a title the better. There’s a reason a good headline sells newspapers, and the same applies to the internet.
4. Post a Link to Your Digg URL in Your Page - Give Digg users as many opportunities to digg your post as possible. A link on your page can give you a whole lot more diggs, and that’s especially important when your post is upcoming.
5. Use the Exponential Growth of Traffic - Lots of news sites are incorporating digg links on every page. That’s because once a site has a certain number of loyal readers, they can influence more and more of the digg frontpage results. Most front page articles only take 40-50 diggs. Sites like news.com have tens of thousands of visitors a day. Can you see their opportunity?
6. Incorporate Keywords Digg Users Like - A while back I submitted a story about using Ubuntu. I had a whole lot more visitors than normal, because there is a group of people looking to promote Ubuntu through digg. About 40 searches for ubuntu resulted in clicks on my article. Other keywords are Google, Apple, and Open Source.

If Digg really starts to get huge, I can see communities of people digging each other’s stories, but that would get pretty lame. Maybe if someone set up an AIM Bot that sent your digg url to everyone else to digg… hmm.

These are all potentially big problems for the Digg system. What do you think is the solution? How would you handle these problems if you were working over at digg? Are these problems really that bad?

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You’ve heard it since the day you where born.

“You can be whatever you want. If you work hard, you will be successful in anything you choose. Even if you start out poor.”

And that has been the way millions of Americans believe life is in the US, despite a whole lot of evidence to otherwise. We have one of the largest gaps between rich and poor for a developed nation, and the quality of living is on its way down for the middle class. Despite all of this, us Americans refuse to believe that we can’t make it on our own.

Then take this quote from the Economist:

Thirty years ago the average real annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was $1.3m: 39 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is $37.5m: over 1,000 times the pay of the average worker. In 2001 the top 1% of households earned 20% of all income and held 33.4% of all net worth. Not since pre-Depression days has the top 1% taken such a big whack.

Has the American Meritocracy Died?

It’s quite possible it has. Because the people who amass these great fortunes do no give them back to the population which gave them their fortunes.

Oh wait, you say, what about Bill and Melinda Gates, or Warren Buffet? Well, the majority of their net worth isn’t going to the people who gave them their incredible wealth. Instead it’s mostly going to the much poorer and underdeveloped countries. Billions of dollars in value directly to developing countries. Isn’t this what we always wanted?

Yes and no.

Yes it is what we wanted because millions of people desperately need this help. It isn’t what we wanted because this help shouldn’t be coming from private citizens with enourmous power. Every year millions are given to corporate interests in the US in sweetheart deals. Because the large companies are the only ones with the resources to lobby their interests, they end up being the only ones getting their agendas served. And the people who control the companies control the future of America more so than any other American.

And that’s where Joe American suffers. The origional idea of equal votes, equal importance, equal opportunity is dead. The only people who get proper legal representation are the ones who can afford it. The same goes for education, health care, housing, and so on down the line.

What do you think is the solution? How do we reverse the trend?

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