Digg Turns Two Years Old; Faces Digging for Cash

Hard to believe, but time really flies: Digg turned two years old. As a powerful marketing tool, it's facing threats to its existence through users willing to game the system. Such unsophisticated solicitations as the following have been used to recruit Diggers:

My name is xxxx and I have been recently promoted as xxxx at xxxx. Our company sells xxxxx . My job is to get people interested in our site, but my problem is that I have not had any success. While searching the web for possible business partners, I started to read about Digg and its popularity…that’s where you come into play. Given the fact that you are the xxxxx user at the website as well as xxxxx, I am contacting you to see if I can somehow recruit you to start getting the word out about our service.

Please check us out, see what you think and get back to me.

It usually takes some time for a user community to transition from giving their time freely to build something from nothing to asking to be paid for their time once success have been achieved. I guess two years is about right for Digg. The question now is how they will channel the growing amount of self-interest motivating users into something positive for the community. It's always neat when through some sleight-of-hand self-interest becomes public interest as Adam Smith put forth about capitalism.

The Digg blog also revealed some interesting stats for its birthday:

• First story to hit the home page after officially releasing: http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Cheat_Sheet

• # of users who registered in the first week: 578
• # of registered users today: 707,593

• First 10 users who registered and are still actively Digging:

http://digg.com/users/Waldoze
http://digg.com/users/drinet
http://digg.com/users/mkirk
http://digg.com/users/jkenzer
http://digg.com/users/nickster
http://digg.com/users/Anthony
http://digg.com/users/dkurfurst
http://digg.com/users/bnitro
http://digg.com/users/CUBApete
http://digg.com/users/martinhuard

• # of servers Digg had at launch: 1 (rented)
• # of servers Digg has today: 103

• # of stories submitted the first week: 923
• # of stories submitted last week: 15,412
• # of stories submitted (all-time): 1,001,865

Labels: Technology

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Digg Turns Two Years Old; Faces Digging for Cash