One of our Mac360 articles was picked up on Digg early Friday. Digg is a techno geeko community that searches the web for interesting articles, news, etc., and promotes the link in a heirarchical voting system.

When a site’s article or link appears on Digg, thousands of online users will click to the site to see wassup and comment.

Lemmings?

Kate’s article on iTV and Sling was featured on Digg and received plenty of comments, some worthy, some not.

The Digg Effect of heavy traffic to a site featured on Digg resulted in a little slower access to Mac360 Friday morning, as bandwidth was maxed out. The PowerMac continued to work fine, though. I’ve enclosed a couple of graphs that truly highlight the Digg Effect on a server.

As your graphics and text indicate, this is a double-edged sword. It brings in traffic, but it strains any site not designed for those volumes. In the end, Digg can generate a de facto DoS attack on a site. That’s kinda scary.

I get an RSS feed from Digg Technology and end up looking at about one tenth of the listings which make it to the front page and thereby the feed. Fairly often making it to the front page of Digg crashes sites completely. If you’re lucky the site has a DiggMirror before going down. That’s one major downside. The other downside is that a good percentage of Digg posters seem to be 18 to 22 years old and are practicing their primary social skill, incivility. On the plus, I find many interesting stories which I never would have otherwise known existed. Overall score? 6 on a 10 scale.