The Digg effect and can Drupal survive it?

It use to be /. that caused all the interest but those days are gone, Digg is the social web2.0 golden boys and rightly so. They have the balance between quick submission and human management and it is already spawned multiple clones. When one of our posts gets submitted to Digg we see a small spike even with just 1 or 2 votes the increase in traffic is about 50 to 60 visitors so what’s it like to be on the popular page? and do you want to be?

Digg users are on the whole technical savy they can surf the web and most know what an advert is and rarely do they click, the only reason to invite Digg into your blogs is publicity. When we have a story submitted it rarely gets past 1 or 2 diggs, the extra visitors rarely go beyond the page they landed on and I suspect the average stay is quite short. This could be because of the appalling writing style of course but I think its more likely just the way Diggers are indeed I should know as its almost exactly what I do.
There are of course ways to better optimise posts for stuntdubl has one of the most extensive posts on the subject I have seen, others have done similar posts seoblackhat 10 steps to Digg front page being one, and JohnTP has his top tips to get on the front page, though this from a Digg users point of view rather then a site owners.
Interesting there seems to be little study of long term exposure to Digg is for a post, our most popular posts have appeared on Digg but barring spikes I doubt it is repeat traffic that is returning to these posts. Greywolf has a pair of posts which detail his experiments with Digg and in particular monitoring exactly what traffic he received, the first monitors what a single front page Digg can do, the second post looked at the first post, which made it onto Digg front page only to be buried.

So how do you survive the Digg effect with a Drupal site:

• Make sure you have plenty of bandwidth if your using Drupal make sure caching is on, you may wish to turn the caching to aggressive and temporarily disable the statistic module.
• Use site throttle and have it configured ahead of time!
• The coral cdn network is useful as it can take the strain of larger content, particularly download files simply append .nyud.net:8080 to urls.

If your planning to get onto Digg think about making dedicated landing page, that is separate from your normal site if it becomes overwhelmed use Drupal to kill or throttle it right back sure, you loose some diggers but if your running an ecommerce site its better then losing your customers remember while all users are potential customers diggers normally are not on your site to buy or click.

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