CS Update 5 – Rock Surge’s First Digg

I’m pretty happy with this week with my case study. It seems that the blog is finally starting to fill out with good content. It doesn’t look like a work in progress anymore. It looks like an established blog. You know what that means? Time to promote.

They say to always start with what you know, so naturally my first plan of action to get Rock Surge on the map is Digg. I had a lot of success using Digg to promote NBB back in January and February. Now I’m sure I would have been able to collect as many readers for NBB as I have without Digg, but I’m positive using Digg shaved at least 6 months off of this blog’s growing time. But anyway, this is about the new blog, right?

Yesterday evening I got a random idea for a post that I thought would perform well on Digg. It took me about 10 minutes to write. The goal of the post was to entertain the hell out of the visitor within 5 seconds. I think I succeeded, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. The post was “A Tribute to the Keytar“. After I got it up (late last night) I asked about 10-15 friends who were online at the time to give it some Digg love and before I went to sleep it was sitting at the top of the Most Popular Upcoming Stories for the Entertainment > Music category. By about 2:00 PM EST today it hit the frontpage.

A couple of things I noticed were significantly different from my Digg experience this time and the last. First off the Entertainment > Music category has a lot less active Diggers than the Technology category (understandably so given the audience). What I didn’t understand to begin with was what sort of impact this would have on how hard it would be to get a story frontpaged. Usually when I am able to get 15 people to Digg my story it gets picked up by Diggers and goes frontpage within a couple of hours. With the Music category it took much longer and had a lot less natural Diggs. On the other hand, it also went frontpage with only 30 Diggs, and the previous frontpaged story in the same category was made popular 17 hours earlier. This means that the fact that it is easier to frontpage in this category plus the longer exposure at the top of the frontpage makes it worthwhile despite the shortage of active Diggers.

Don’t get me wrong, as I look at my MBL stats right now I’ve had 10,000 Diggers hit the site. That’s not too shabby.

The was a little snag, however. Seconds after the story hit frontpage the server crashed. You may have noticed some downtime earlier on NBB – they’re on the same server. This server also hosts Career Ramblings which was sitting in the top 3 on Netscape at the same time. Nate (the owner of the server) did his best to keep the server from burning up. He restarted it several times but it was crashing seconds after each time. Unfortunately I’m sure I ended up losing a ton of potential readers – lucky for me, however, the story never got buried off the frontpage. Anyways, Nate told me he invested in some extra RAM which should prevent that from happening again.

As for the results, well you’ll have to wait for the next case study update!