Webupon

Since the start of the month Digg has been experimenting with their new Digg trends. I guess they liked how the beta went since it went live today.

With Digg trends submitted stories which receive a high volume of activity (diggs and comments etc…) in a short space of time will become a trend. When a story trends, it will appear on the home page and give users the opportunity to ‘digg’ it to the main homepage or bury it to the depths of forgotten submissions.

Digg trends will allow stories to hit the front page faster and get quicker coverage. No information has been released yet about how much activity a story needs to trend but, as always, the community gets the final say on what reaches the homepage.

I can see one disadvantage to the trends however. High volumes of traffic can flow from the Digg front page and more than a few black hat marketers know this. Digg bots have been created to create and Digg stories to force them to the front of the page.

With Digg trends, new stories have a quicker route to the front page but so do stories with ‘fake diggs’. All the marketer has to do is fake enough fake activity on the submission and get it to trend. The Digg community can usually pick up on fake Diggs by looking at previous users who ‘dugg’ the story. With Digg trends, this information isn’t shown. Digg trends only show the basics.

The benefit to the Digg social media website is how community orientated it is. Hopefully, even if the system is exploited these stories will get pushed back down and the marketer will only get 10 minutes of exposure on the front page.

A trending story will appear as a trend for ten minutes and only happens a few times a day. If you don’t want to miss trending stories you can follow Diggs new Twitter account specifically for trends @digg_trends.

I’ve seen several submissions which I believe were worthy of the home page but they never took off. Digg trends will, hopefully, get these kinds of stories of the ground.