Steve Rubel reports that Google has released a new iGoogle Gadget named What’s Popular. The gadget looks like a small little Digg clone to me. Here is a screen capture:

As you can see, you can mark up or down a story and it shows the number of “pops” next to the story, plus when it was first added. You can even submit your own stories and keep track of your submissions and “my pops.” If you maximize the gadget, you can further filter the stories. Here is a screen capture:

I wonder if this will catch on? We remember when AOL turned Netscape into a Digg clone and it failed. Yahoo also turned Yahoo Buzz into a Digg clone and I don’t believe it has caught on as Yahoo might have hoped.

Here is how Google describes this gadget:

The What’s Popular gadget by Google helps you discover interesting items from all over the Internet.

How we find interesting stuff What’s Popular uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader.

Ratings You can rate items that you like or dislike by clicking the ratings buttons next to each item. If you change your mind, you can change your rating at anytime. The What’s Popular gadget looks at what users liked or disliked to improve its ranking of interesting items.

Add a URL Tell What’s Popular about interesting items you have found! If they become popular, they may rise to the top of our list! You can submit an item with or without attribution to yourself and preview your submission before you post. If you decide to associate your username with your submission you’ll be able to edit its title and description. The items you submitted can be found in the “My adds” area, where you can remove your name if you change your mind.

Terms of Service and Privacy What’s Popular is governed by the Google Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Users who repeatedly submit bad content to What’s Popular may have their rating and adding privileges temporarily suspended. Please go here for issues relating to copyright. All other violations of our terms of use can be reported through the report abuse links.

ClickZ reports Digg has dropped Microsoft as the exclusive ad provider for the site. Microsoft ads started appearing on Digg in October 2007 after Digg and Microsoft made the deal in July.

Prior, Digg used Google AdSense ads to monetize the site. Then Digg dropped Google for Microsoft ads and now, it appears Digg will sell ads directly, and continue to use Microsoft ads for open inventory. The Digg/Microsoft partnership was suppose to last until the summer 2010. Bring the ad management in house will allow Digg to explore more revenue models and create custom ads, that are outside of the IAB standards.

Digg is promising a significant change to how its DiggBar framebar operates, one that should solve SEO concerns about how link credit is passed on but won’t entirely remove misgivings about the framing of content.

With the new implementation scheduled for next week, only those who are logged into Digg will see the DiggBar. So if you click on a DiggBar URL from Twitter, you won’t see the DiggBar unless you’ve already been to Digg and have a logged in status. Just having a Digg cookie won’t be enough, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose told me when we talked about the new implementation yesterday. A Digg user must be logged in for a DiggBar to show. Logged in users can also opt-out of seeing the DiggBar.

Those who are NOT logged in will simply be redirected to the destination page, via a 301 permanent redirect. This will include search engines that follow those links. Digg’s been in touch with Google’s Matt Cutts on the change, which I’ve confirmed. The consensus is that Google will register DiggBar links as 301 redirects.

Overall, this change is a good thing. It means that link credit will flow to the destination site, rather than being kept by Digg itself.

There remains the separate issue of framing, how that was unpopular in the past and remains so in many quarters given the recent resurgence. Yesterday, it was pointed out by Michael Gray how Kevin Rose himself wasn’t pleased to find his own content being framed. So why do this to others, I asked him.

Kevin’s response was that he felt the Truveo experience was different. He wasn’t a logged in user there, so wasn’t expecting that type of display. He also didn’t like that it was an all-panel framing — that his content was completely surrounded by all four sides, in a frame.

I have mixed feelings. Showing a frame to only logged-in users seems like a fair compromise. There’s no doubt that for some Digg users, the framebar is useful. It’s also easier for them to use than downloading a separate toolbar (though Kevin said Digg still plans to improve and promote its toolbar).

On the other hand, I still hate frames. I also really worry that this will just cause other services to do the same. Imagine if Google decided that it should put up a Google framebar for anyone logged into one of its services? I still think the internet would explode in fury over such a move. But Digg’s compromise would give Google the cover to do so — as it would give cover to Yahoo or Microsoft, and as it now extends cover to Facebook that already does framing.

I wish Digg had made the tough decision to drop the framebar entirely, so that pressure could then be applied to Facebook and StumbleUpon and others to drop theirs. But the compromise does seem a good one, as long as it doesn’t end up opening the gates for more framing. Certainly sites that object can continue to run framebusting scripts, as we do here. That solves the frame issue for them, and the other change deals with the link credit issue that was developing.

For more about the DiggBar, framebusting, 301 redirection and other issues, see these two past articles from me that go into them in much more depth:

• The Growth Of Framebars & Kevin Rose On The DiggBar
• URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?

For more, see discussion on Techmeme.

The DiggBar has been out for about a week now. Since then, there continues to be concerns over twin issues of whether it robs sites of link love and frames their contents in a way that’s unfair to publishers. I had a good conversation with Digg cofounder Kevin Rose today about these issues and how Digg is actively looking at ways to solve worries over the tool.

For those unfamiliar with the DiggBar, it allows people to create a short URL that’s useful in services like Twitter. Anyone clicking on a shortened URL made through Digg gets to a page with a DiggBar at the top. For example, here’s how it looks for a post I recently did on my personal blog about newspapers and concerns over Google:

The red arrow points at one feature, how the DiggBar allows anyone to vote on the page they’re viewing. There are other handy features, such as the ability to see any comments people have made at Digg about the page:

There’s no doubt that if you use Digg a lot, you’ll probably love the DiggBar. But the bar does two things that aren’t making some people (including me) very happy. It doesn’t pass along link credit, and it frames web content.

Link Credit Issues

Last week, my URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? article went into depth about how various URL shorteners work. A key issue is whether these shorteners tells search engines to credit the destination URLs they point at. Those issues what’s called a “301 redirect” do this correctly (my What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters article covers more about link credit issues and why it is important to search rankings).

The DiggBar does not do a 301 redirect (nor can it, as this would prevent the DiggBar from showing at all). If you shorten a page using DiggBar service, then Twitter the short URL you receive, any links that Google or other search engines find via that short URL will send credit to Digg, not to the destination page you shortened.

A sidenote here. Twitter automatically puts a “nofollow attribute” on any links that people tweet. That’s a method to tell search engines that the links shouldn’t be counted as “votes” as part of their ranking processes. However, tweets often appear off the Twitter.com domain. In some of these places, the nofollow attribute (or tag) doesn’t get used. So tweeted links can get counted by search engines, and it remains important that URL shorteners pass along credit to the destination pages.

Digg had a blog post out yesterday explaining that they had done some things they believed would stem concerns about link credit not flowing properly. SEO expert Greg Boser dissected that post, finding it didn’t hold up. I also looked at it today and found problems:

1) Using the noindex tag prevents the pages that Digg makes with shortened URLs from being spidered by Google and other search engines, but that does not solve the issue of them still accumulating all the link credit rather than this going to the destination URL. Also, so far despite using noindex, some of these pages are getting listed in Google. Here’s another example of this. (Looking at the source code, that page lacked a noindex tag an a canonical tag. It seems like originally, the DiggBar didn’t add these tags. Now that they are present, it will take search engines a few days to weeks to catch-up).

2) Using the canonical tag as a form of redirection doesn’t work, because that tag is still treated as a “hint” by search engines rather than an must obey instruction. It also doesn’t work across different domains (IE, Digg.com can’t point at content off Digg.com’s own domain and use the tag to tell the search engines anything).3) The “source URL” solution Digg discusses doesn’t solve anything. What this means is that if you’re on the Digg home page, stories are listed there from across the web. For example, here’s a popular one right now from the Daily Telegraph:

http://digg.com/d1oOii

Digg uses a short URL to point you at that story, which in turn brings the DiggBar up on the top of the page. However, if you can’t run JavaScript (as search engines operate), then you get the long “source URL” like this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/evolution/5131017/Egg-collected-by-Charles-Darwin-found-at-Cambridge-University-after-200-years.html

Digg’s thought was that by showing the long “source” URL to search engines, then the long URL ultimately will get all the link credit. However, there are plenty of places where the short URL will be found across the web by search engines because it is listed with regular HTML, rather than through JavaScript.

Framing Issues

Back in the late 1990s, framing was a big issue. For those unfamiliar, frames allow a web site to pull in content from other web sites into their own pages. It was much loathed for a variety of reasons. It often led to bad user experience. It caused serious issues for search engines, making it difficult for them to spider content properly. Some felt it was a copyright violation — that the site doing the framing was effectively copying their material without permission.

Framing largely disappeared for all of these issues. But now it’s coming back, and Digg’s use with the DiggBar may have been the tipping point.

Last October, StumbleUpon added framing of sites, so that anyone starting a browsing experience from StumbleUpon’s home page gets a framebar like this, as the red arrow points at:

Back in December, Facebook added its own framing of content through a framebar that appears when you click on posted links from within the service. Again, the red arrow points to an example that you can see for yourself here:

Ask.com started framing search results in February. The red arrow below points to the framebar, which appears when you click from Ask search results to a web page that’s listed, like this:

Ask used to do this when it first started out back in the 90s, then dropped framing apparently because so many sites moved away from that model. Now with harder economic times, it apparently finds value in trying to take over the top part of your browser window.

Of course, Google also frames web sites with its Google Image Search service. I believe it has operated this way years and years ago from when image search first started:

There was actually a lawsuit over this, which Google won. Despite that, this might be a good time for Google to reconsider the framing it does.

Also, if Google were ever to frame web sites when you click to them from search results in the way Ask does, the web would almost certain erupt in anger. I don’t think this will happen, of course — but if it’s not something we’d allow Google to do, it’s not something we should be allowing any sites to do.

Framebars Versus Toolbars

Clearly Digg didn’t start the new wave of framing, but it certainly has taken much more heat than Facebook or StumbleUpon over it. I think it’s the combination of URL shortening with framing that’s tipped people over the edge. That mixed framing with the popularity Twitter, where most people these days seem to be using URL shorteners. I think it creates worry that there will be no stopping framing or framebars now.

I feel for services like Digg and Facebook and StumbleUpon. The framebars they’ve created are useful and certainly easier than having users install toolbars for their browsers. But they remain frames, and they bring with them all the negatives about frames that we had in the past.

I’d hope that perhaps there’s an industry move to develop some standards around framebars. For example, if they’re going to be used, perhaps they are less intrusive to a publisher if shown at the bottom of a browser window, rather than at the top. Perhaps there’s also a way to ensure that the URL showing in the browser window remains that of the “source” site with the framebar also displayed (it’s been a long time since I played with frames, so I’m not sure this can be done).

Other ideas might include developing a standard script that publishers can use if they want to break frame code but also inform visitors from a particular site (such as Digg or Facebook) that they can get similar functionality using software toolbars. Perhaps pop-up toolbars in a separate window could work, though there are issues with pop-up blockers.

I don’t know the right answer. Personally, I think the easiest thing would be for everyone to just say no to frames. If you want your dedicated users to have toolbar-like functionality, then have them install an actual toolbar, not a framebar.

Kevin Rose On DiggBar

How’s Digg viewing the uproar? “It’s been a crazy learning experience for us,” Rose said. “We want to follow best practices.”

Rose explained that initially, Digg wanted simply to do a toolbar to help their most active users more easily Digg content or comment on it.

“We wondered what can we create that allows people to go visit that site with a single click and still get a Digg experience. That was kind of the idea behind creating the bar in the first place,” he said.

More as an afterthought, when seeing how popular it was to shorten URLs on Twitter, Digg added on a shortening aspect to the DiggBar.

“The goal in creating this wasn’t, ‘Let’s be the universal URL shortener.’ It was ‘Let’s make a tool that can enhance the experience for Digg users’.”

Rose said someone at Digg did speak with a software engineer at Google, as mentioned in their blog post, about the best way to pass along credit to Google — but he didn’t know who that was. Fair to say, they’ll get the straight scoop shortly, as Rose is now set to speak to Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s spam fighting efforts and who also closely watches over webmaster issues.

As for the DiggBar’s future itself, Rose said the company is taking in all the feedback to determine what’s the next best step.

“I want to make it known by all means that we’re sitting down and thinking about this stuff and trying to come up with solutions that work for anyone,” he said.

What’s A Webmaster To Do?

While Digg reexamines the DiggBar, there are webmasters who will remain concerned. My original article on URL shorteners has code you can use to block framebars. Wikipedia has a page about this, too, and you can see John Gruber’s code here. By the way, we actually had that code on our site before the DiggBar came out, just as a general best practice of breaking frames.

Of course, if you like the idea that people can more easily Digg (or Stumble or Facebook) your content, then you might not have an issue with using the frames.

I’d still recommend that if you’re wanting to shorten URLs for your own sites, use a service that’s primarily built for that and which does 301 redirect.

Jay Anderson from Digg announced that the company has received $28.7 million in new funding through Highland Capital Partners. This new funding will enable Digg to expand their operations and hire more help for that expansion.

Digg hopes to be able to use these funds to:

• Improve their infrastructure
• Expand internationally
• Hire more staff
• Personalize the Digg experience
• Enhance the recommendation system
• And more features…

There are ways in which Digg is like YouTube: it’s the “brand” in a competitive “social news” segment that also features Yahoo Buzz, AOL’s Propeller, MySpace News, Reddit, Ask Big News and, by some counts, more than 80 others. Similarly, YouTube was the “brand” in a crowded video segment when Google acquired the company.

Digg has more or less been for sale for months and rumors have been circulating that either Google or Microsoft would buy the company.

Now TechCrunch is reporting that Digg is close to selling for $200 million to Google. That compares with the originally rumored $300 million price target.

Digg has a display ad deal with Microsoft, which presumably would end or be threatened if Google actually acquired the company. But that’s the least interesting part of this rumor.

More interesting to consider is how and where Google might use Digg or its underlying algorithms. For example, Google has been testing an experimental interface that allows for individual and community voting on the relevance of search results. It thus may be that a Digg acquisition would hold broader, general search implications for Google.

Digg itself started life as a “news” site but is angling to become a much broader “recommendations engine” across a range of categories. One might see that integrated into Maps/Local and other areas on Google. Indeed, the company always seems to have several motives and use cases for its acquisitions.

Assuming for a moment the truth of the rumor, Eric Eldon at VentureBeat asks a very interesting question: why doesn’t Google build its own version of Digg? It certainly could. And while Digg is a popular site, it’s hardly the mainstream breakaway success that YouTube had become when Google acquired the latter in October 2006.

In fact, Digg has fallen behind the newer Yahoo Buzz in terms of traffic according to comScore. So it may be something of a perishable asset; Digg itself seems to be acting that way.

There’s more coverage and discussion on Techmeme.

Last year I wrote a post called 5 Reasons To Put Viral Content On Mini-Sites, providing reasons why you might opt to use a mini-site rather than keeping all the content on your main domain. One of the reasons was because content might not spread due to your domain.

Even though mini-sites doesn’t always make sense from an SEO standpoint, it’s now getting to the point where they’re a must if you want to keep linkbaiting with your commercial domains. You see, commercial domains just won’t work on Digg anymore. Sure, you can fire off a successful linkbait piece or even two if you’re lucky, but try any more than that and you’ll see what happens. Your domain will be banned from any further submissions faster than you can say “Reddit.” Banning aside, a commercial domain itself throws up a red flag to social media users and will make it that much harder to get something popular.

Enter the mini-site. Setting up a mini-site is one great alternative for companies who suffer from the commercial domain plague. It will give you a new place to produce content in a non-commercial manner, which means you can now get back to your regularly scheduled linkbaiting. Just one problem, right? Why would you care about getting links to some other domain?

There are a number of different strategies you can implement here. The 301 redirect seems to be the most popular and most effective, especially if you’re looking to carry link juice. But it’s also a strategy that needs to be pulled off with finesse. For a while people were just using the 301 to mask the URL appearance on Digg and to get around a banned domain. Digg users are getting savvy, though, and seem to be picking up on that trick. A better approach is to set up 301 redirects to all the links a few weeks after the campaign is over.

I don’t want to get involved in the ethics of using 301s here. I’ll leave that up to your own judgement. The point is that you now have another reason to consider setting up that mini-site.

Cameron Olthuis is the Founder and CEO of Factive Media. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Valleywag has screen captures of a new Yahoo web site, reportedly launching February 26th, named Yahoo Buzz Beta.

Yahoo Buzz will be similar to Digg, but will start only with 100 sites allowed into the system. After the initial beta period, all sites that are accepted into the Yahoo Publisher Network will be allowed to be added to Yahoo Buzz.

By looking at the screen captures, it appears that each article is given a “buzz score.” The buzz score seems to be generated by users clicking a “buzz it” icon. In addition, on the right side of Yahoo Buzz stories are recent “Top Searches,” which are updated hourly.

Yahoo Buzz is currently a blog with data on top keyword searches from Yahoo Search. Here is the current Buzz FAQ, but reportedly, this new site will replace the current Yahoo Buzz section.

Let’s not forget that AOL’s Netscape tried to go the Digg route with Netscape.com but ultimately failed.

Two days ago, Digg went down for a short while while changes were being implemented in the system. While nothing was immediately apparent, Brent Csutoras noticed some slight changes, and after several hours, a bigger trend emerged: the algorithm had changed and you needed a lot more votes to hit the front page of Digg. Brent says:

At 5:12 pm PST, about 7 1/2 hours after Babblin5 submitted the post Two Diggs One Cup made it to the front page of digg. It took 156 diggs with 33 comments for the article to make it, something it would have taken less than 100 to do a week ago.

In response, Kevin Rose used the Digg Blog to announce that yes, Digg implemented a recent algorithm change. Immediately, the Digg community reacted strongly to these changes. Digg’s “unofficial” podcast, The Drill Down, which is led by the the top three Digg submitters, went into emergency mode on Ustream and people began offering their thoughts on the implications of the change. The top users were ready to propose that nobody use Digg at least until Monday.

The involvement on the podcast was so strong that it ultimately came to the attention of Digg founder Kevin Rose and its CEO, Jay Adelson. Both called in late at night (11PM Pacific, 2AM Eastern) to voice their reasoning behind the changes and to address other user complaints. I ended up staying up nearly all night to “liveblog” the event and summarized the reactions of the Digg staff in a post entitled Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson Respond to Digg Complaints. The takeaways:

• The Digg algorithm is still working itself out. We’re not seeing what will be the norm on the site right now, but in a few days, we will.
• Digg’s algorithm has been implemented to get a diverse crowd to vote upon any specific story.
• Digg is paving the road for a recommendation engine that will suggest stories for users to vote upon based on their past voting habits.
• Users being banned from Digg was also a concern. Jay says that there are typically TOS violations that account for these bannings. Obviously, additional information is not available.
• A concern also arose about an unspoken-about “autobury” list that would prevent certain domains from getting exposure on Digg’s front page. Neither Jay nor Kevin explicitly denied the existence of such a list. The tools available at the present time capture only a fraction of user data and cannot accurately pinpoint whether a story has been buried or not.

While I appreciate that Kevin and Jay came out to talk to the community on such short notice, after my story was submitted to Digg, it got buried within an hour, which makes Digg’s denial of the autobury feature still hard to believe. Meanwhile, two similar stories (that aren’t nearly as in-depth) are still on Digg’s upcoming list. Also, I’ve done my own observations using Digg Spy (Digg’s tool that records user activity on the site) and it has never missed any of my frequent activity, so while it’s believable that Digg Spy may not capture all data, it certainly does a pretty accurate job at capturing mine, and many people know that I’m a very heavy Digg user.

Is a Digg revolt still on the horizon? Quite possibly, yes. Concerns are still not being appropriately addressed. In the mass exodus that almost occurred, a Revoltnation website was erected to announce plans to revolt on Digg. Mashable and TechCrunch provide their own take.

Other Digg “revolt” coverage follows:

• Digg: New Digg Algorithm Angers the Social Masses, Valleywag
• An Open Letter to Digg from Top Digg Users, Valleywag
• Digg: New Algorithm Changes, Techmeme
• From Revolt to Revolution in 12 Hours or Less, Muhammad Saleem
• The Digg Community’s Concerns with Digg, The Drill Down
• Digg Algo Changes, SEO Wife
• Digg Revolt, Cornwall SEO

Tamar Weinberg is a social media enthusiast who blogs about Digg and other social news sites and services on Techipedia.

How can you increase your chances of appealing to an average Digger, Stumbler, or other social media user, and actually get them to vote for your content? Consider this quote from John Maynard Keynes, British born economist responsible for Keynesian economics, who explains how markets work by making an analogy to a beauty contest:

“It is not a case of choosing those [faces] which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” (Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

What he means is that people don’t make objective choices based on their own judgment. Rather, they choose what they think the average person is going to agree with as being the right choice. The same principle applies to social news sites. People mostly submit and vote for content not because they objectively think the content is good, but because they think that the community in general is going to find the content to be good. To illustrate this point, let’s look at the following news submission to Digg and break down the things that people look at as they anticipate the community’s verdict:

1. Play the field

As the community at Digg grows, the site is becoming less and less about technology news (where it was focused initially) and more about ‘world news and business’ and ‘offbeat’ content. To be on top of the social news pile, you have to keep an eye on the site’s ever-changing demographic and user preferences. This doesn’t mean that the same content that was popular before cannot be popular again. What this means is that you have to find a new framework (angle) in which to present your content.

There are several ways of playing the categories on Digg:

You can you can create content purely for the more popular categories (like business and finance), in which case there will be significantly more competition, but if you’re successful the payoff will be much higher.

You can create content for a relatively less popular categories (like sports), in which case the competition will not be as tough but the payoff won’t be as high.

Or, you can create content that is about a more popular category, but applicable to a less popular category. This way, you can get the best results with the least amount of competition. A great example of this is a post I recently read, titled 4 Ways Technology is Changing Sports Officiating. The post is great because it is about technology (hot category) and how it is changing sports (not-so-hot category). Therefore, it can be submitted to the sports category and be made popular easily, but still drive the traffic of a story from a popular category. (There are other reasons for the fact that this particular submission wasn’t significantly promoted, but the principle remains true.)

2. Obsess over your titles

There was a time when sensationalism ruled the social news space. As the space matures (ever so slowly), there is a backlash brewing against sensationalism, and using that age-old trick can will actually make the community go out of its way to bury you. The good thing is that this actually makes our job easier because it requires much less imagination to get attention. While writing your title, take note of the following:

Stick with regular formatting. Don’t use special characters, capital letters throughout, or excessive punctuation. Make sure there are no spelling mistakes or grammatical errors (the audience can be vicious if this is the case).

Try to use trigger words when possible, without overdoing it. If you’ve been on the site long enough, you start living its culture. If you’re writing about a popular meme, be sure to use buzz words that will get people’s attention.

Don’t give it all away. You want people to know what you’re writing about without actually telling them what you wrote.

3. Summarize, and don’t state the obvious

There’s no better way to sabotage any chances you have than to write “Title says it all,” “Enough said,” or something to that effect, for your summary. As a submitter that’s the easy approach—just don’t do it. As a content producer wanting to ensure submissions from your site aren’t botched, it’s in your best interest to present a summary of your content at the very top, before the actual article. Again, as with the title, a summary shouldn’t include any spoilers, but should make promises that you can deliver on.

Think of the summary as your chance to pitch the story. Answer the reader’s question: “Why should I click through to read this? Please tell me in 150 characters or less.”

4. Make it “picture perfect”

Not to be confused with the pictures section on Digg (though that warrants an entire post of its own), this refers to the use of thumbnails. The Digg submission process automatically picks up the images used on your page and allows a submitter to use one of them as a representative thumbnail next to the submission. With a title, summary, and now a thumbnail, a social news submission is the best summarized representation of your content, and you should take advantage of it. With every other submission carrying a thumbnail next to it, being the odd one out in this case is not a good thing.

Make sure that the images are relevant but provocative.

5. Take advantage of network effects

Making friends on social media sites is good simply because it helps you immediately get exposure to a much larger direct audience and helps you much more accurately asses what the middle of the road submission is (one that would appeal to the masses and help you win the beauty pageant). There is an equally important secondary effect, however, that a lot of people don’t give much thought to. A submission that is Dugg by one of your friends is indicated with a green sash, and no matter how poorly a submission is doing on the rest of the points mentioned in this post, if it has a green sash, one feels compelled to check it out.

This secondary effect is pretty much boundless: If you have 100 friends on Digg who have 10 unique friends each, even if 10% of your friends Digg something, that submission is ‘green-sashed’ for 200 people (100 of your friends, and 10 friends each for the 10 people that actually Dugg the story).

6. Woo the power users

Though it’s not a make-or-break scenario, if your content is submitted by a power user, it has a much higher chance of getting promoted, regardless of the algorithmic bias against these users. Part of the reason for this is because of the branding that these users have—there is implicit trust that most community members place in submissions from these users (and most often it is easy to ignore everything else and take a chance on something just because a power user endorses it). Not to forget that the “green-sash effect” is also that much more extensive for power users.

Though it’s very easy to get in touch with a power user, don’t do it unless you plan on pitching only your best.

7. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk

There is no doubt about the impact of comments on the success of a social news submission. First of all, on a very basic level, if a story is in the upcoming section with 100 Diggs and absolutely no discussion, people are bound to think something fishy is going on. In addition to that, there are several exposure-related benefits of contributing comments:

Every time someone makes a comment, it adds to the “hotness” of a story. A combination of the quality, quantity, and time of Diggs and comments on a story is what it takes to push a story from just the queue to the “hot in all topics” category and eventually to the Digg home page.

Also, every time someone makes a comment, the activity is recorded and can be shown in Digg/Spy, as well as users’ activity pages. Comments breed more comments, which ultimately means more visibility.

Winning the pageant

There are two schools of thought for achieving success on social news networks. The first is to write something provocative and incite emotion, and the second is to appeal to the masses and pander to the middle of the road. Both can be equally successful if you can manage to find out who your audience is. For example, if you’re going to be writing about technology, anything about Microsoft is going to be provocative but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be successful (simply because the Apple camp is stronger). In situations where you can’t judge which camp in your audience is stronger, targeting the average can be well worth it.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.