Great Post Written by GrayWolf

For anyone who’s looking at the social bookmarking space the one of the websites getting a lot of attention and shouldn’t be ignored it’s Digg. In Part I I’m going to go over some of the basics to help you get started with Digg.

Sign Up
Signup is pretty straight forward username, password, captcha and a verification email. One piece of advice if you are going to be submitting stories/pages from your own website or blog I would try to choose a name that doesn’t immediately make a connection. For example “BlueWidgetJohn” submitting stories from “bluewidgets.com” is frowned upon. During the signup process you are asked to email your friends who you want to let know you are on Digg, I’d skip this step for now, unless you already know people who have been using Digg. I’d also suggest uploading an avatar. Avatars that are brightly colored and distinctive help you build your own brand on Digg.

Navigating Digg
Digg is divided up into several main categories each with several subcategories. By navigating to the main categories you see stories submitted by other users that were voted interesting, popular, cool, funny, informative, educational or in some way noteworthy. The story most recently voted popular (more about that later on) will be at the top. As new stories are promoted old stories move down the list. The main category (for example Science) will show the popular stories for all of the subcategories underneath it (in this case Space, Environment, Health and General Sciences). The subcategories only show stories within that subcategory. This is the default view or “newly popular” view. There are links to other sort mechanisms such as “last 24 hours”, “last 7 days”, “last 30 days” and “last 365 days”. Each of these views ranks stories by number of votes in descending order (this is helpful for doing research on what types of stories the Digg community likes).

At the far right is a tab called “Upcoming Stories”. This shows all of the stories that members have submitted but have not yet been made popular. There is drop down with the default selection of “show newest stories” these are stories recently submitted by other users with the most recent at the top. Refresh the page and the stories will drop down as new submissions are made. There are other choices such as “show oldest”, “show least popular”, and “show most commented” which are pretty self explanatory. The selection I find most valuable is “show most popular”. This view shows stories that have not yet been voted popular ranked in order of most votes. Think of these as stories that are “on deck” and likely to be voted popular.

Looking at a Submission
Next to each story is a big button with a number in it and a small button underneath it that will either say “Digg it” or “dugg”. When you click on either box you will be voting (known as Digging) that story. A JavaScript animation will appear, the vote count will go up and the lower box will change from “Digg it” to “dugg”. To the right of the story the title is listed, if you click on this you will be taken to the story on another website. If you”ve voted for the story a “my #1″ box will be shown, you can pick one story as your #1 story each day. Voting for another story and changing it to your #1 story removes your first #1 selection (but the Digg vote still stays). Under the title you have the avatar of the person who submitted the story (this is where building your Digg brand comes in). Next to the icon is the users name which links to the users profile (more on that later on). Next to that is an indicator telling you how long ago the story was submitted. Every story has 24 hours to accumulate enough votes to become popular after 24 hours you can still get votes but you”ll never make the popular page. Next to the time is the domain the story comes from. Users prefer stories from credible domains, but it”s not a requirement. Underneath that is the snippet from or describing the story. The bottom row tells you how many comments, and links to the individual comments. Next to that are links to “blog it” or “email it” (more about those later) a link to the category and the bury feature (more about that later).

You Can Read the Rest at WebMaster World! There is a reason GrayWolf didn’t post the entire article at his blog … so I won’t step on his toes …

(Part II coming soon)