I’ve found Diggers like statistics. I received a great response to my Most Powerful Sites on Digg and the last Most Powerful Members on Digg article, but those were only for a 30 day period (as long as Digg allows a visitor to go back). In another recent article submitted, I had a large number of people requesting a follow-up Most Powerful Member post, and since over a month has past, I’ve sat down and recalculated everything again.

These numbers are analyzing how many articles each top user got to the homepage (and not buried) from April 19th, 2007 to May 19th, 2007… the most powerful users on Digg.

I’ve also gone an additional step in this post and included how many friends each user has. A lot of people speculate one trick to help your articles get to the homepage is to build a large friend-base, and digging each other’s articles whenever one person submits something. That said, if anyone is feeling lonely, I’ll definitely be your friend. In the following list, I’ve excluded anyone with less than two articles hitting homepage. In the case of a tie, I ranked users with articles hitting homepage more recently higher.

Are you listed?

#1 MrBabyMan (383 Friends) — sixty four articles
#2 mklopez (153 Friends) — sixty articles
#3 Alexius (12 Friends) — fifty one articles
#4 skored (291 Friends) — forty three articles
#5 msaleem (548 Friends) — forty three articles
#6 supernova17 (135 Friends) — forty two articles
#7 moojj (510 Friends) — forty two articles
#8 IvanB (641 Friends) — thirty seven articles
#9 sepultura (170 Friends) — thirty two articles
#10 interg12 (933 Friends) — thirty articles
Read the rest of this entry …

Desktop Nexus is a wallpaper site with the vision of stepping over the boundaries of traditional wallpaper sharing… and I will go as far as saying that it is currently one of the most technologically advanced wallpaper galleries in the entire world.

Completely member oriented, anyone can upload wallpapers, then the community votes if they’re a high enough quality to be added to the galleries, or if they should be deleted forever… all driven through the “Pending Additions” categories. Heavily endowed with AJAX and RSS, meta-moderation, voting and tagging, it’s truly fresh in this industry.

For example, if someone uploads a 1024×768 wallpaper, Desktop Nexus will automatically resize and remaster that wallpaper for another visitor who requests it in say, 1600×1200. It then goes a step farther and will show an AJAX script to allow any user to instantly crop (interactive) or stretch the wallpaper to create a widescreen version for anyone who requests it… so essentially one wallpaper of any size is uploaded, and Desktop Nexus will make it available to anyone with any resolution… completely bypassing previous limitations of wallpaper sharing, standard aspect ratio or widescreen.

Now, let’s take a quick visual tour of the coolest parts of Desktop Nexus.

AJAX Wallpaper Uploads, plus the ability to upload ZIP files for Mass Uploads (upload dozens of wallpapers at a time!):

And after the wallpaper is uploaded, it undergoes a voting process where the community decides if it’s quality is good enough to be added to the galleries:

Wallpapers can be tagged with descriptive words to link similar ones together. AJAX technology helps suggest commonly used tags as you type.

Our tag clouds are a great way of quickly seeing what’s popular in each gallery.

Every member (quick, free signup) gets a My Desktop Nexus profile they can tweak and customize, allowing them to share everything from their hobbies to their favorite wallpapers.

I have big dreams for this site, and for nearly a year I’ve poured my heart into it, spending a week on a small detail most users would never even notice. I honestly believe this site could become the next YouTube, as to this day there is no household name for wallpaper sites. There is a dominate site in almost every industry, but wallpapers is 95% scattered small sites. Before when I wanted a wallpaper, I went digging through Google Images, sorting through the low quality and odd size images. Sure, Webshots did pretty well, but I believe they shot themselves in the foot with advertising in their downloadable client. We can do better. I want someone to be sitting in their chair and decide their desktop background is getting old, and for the first thought through their mind to be “Desktop Nexus”.

We’re still tweaking the site and adding new functionality all the time, so stay tuned. I’d also appreciate any feedback you have on Desktop Nexus. Thanks!

Go There -> Desktop Nexus Wallpapers

Two days back I spent an insane amount of time doing research and calculating statistics for the top digg users, based on how many homepage articles they submitted over a 30 day period of time.

From the results:

I’ve finally finished adding up all the authors who’s submissions made homepage in the past 30 days (same as before, March 15th 2007 to April 15th 2007), and it had a strangely cool outcome. The number of users who had more than one article hit the homepage in the past 30 days works out to be EXACTLY 300. It’s the small things in life….

I submitted the article to Digg (link), and within 3 hours it had almost 100 diggs. It quickly became the most popular upcoming article, but even at 100+ diggs, it did not cross over to homepage. In fact, after sitting there at the top of upcoming for an hour or two, it got buried. Here’s an example of the comments posted on the digg article after it happened, “This should hit the front page, I can’t believe it got buried.”

I’m not saying anything that didn’t deserve it should have been homepaged, I’m just curious with such high support in upcoming, why it didn’t cross over.

Now, I’m not sure what happened with Digg’s system there, but this article has been attracting quite a bit of buzz on it’s own, including a post on seomoz: link. From that, I’ve decided to try again and see if things happen any differently this time. If you know what could have stopped this article from crossing over to the homepage last time, I’d be curious to know (please leave a comment here).

Anyway, now to the results! Here are the top 50 most powerful digg users for the previous 30 days. View the full list of 300 here.

#1  MrBabyMan — one hundred thirty three articles (!!!)
#2  gmark13 — forty eight articles
#3  supernova17 — forty five articles
#4  mklopez — forty four articles
#5  AdmiralAdama — forty articles
#6  1KrazyKorean — thirty five articles
#7  interg12 — thirty articles
#8  skored — twenty six articles
#9  Blakovitch — twenty five articles
#10  IvanB — twenty four articles
#11  noname94 — twenty three articles
#12  populist — nineteen articles
#13  webtickle — nineteen articles
#14  zaibatsu — nineteen articles
#15  ace77 — eighteen articles
#16  webtech — sixteen articles
#17  sepultura — sixteen articles
#18  Andy.D — fifteen articles
#19  tomboy501 — fourteen articles
#20  jstohler — fourteen articles
#21  MercedRocks — fourteen articles
#22  OneManArmy — fourteen articles
#23  kevinrose — fourteen articles
#24  burkinaboy — fourteen articles
#25  djm0ther — thirteen articles
#26  CLIFFosakaJAPAN — thirteen articles
#27  koregaonpark — twelve articles
#28  Mythos — eleven articles
#29  decepticrat — eleven articles
#30  estvir — ten articles
#31  H3LLSL337 — ten articles
#32  littlebylittle — ten articles
#33  bonlebon — ten articles
#34  geekchic — nine articles
#35  drum_bum — nine articles
#36  gokss — eight articles
#37  webtechgeek — eight articles
#38  DiggityMcDigg — eight articles
#39  ojames — eight articles
#40  themaximus — seven articles
#41  Viewel — seven articles
#42  mcflynnthm — seven articles
#43  elsewhen — seven articles
#44  econoar — seven articles
#45  savingadvice — seven articles
#46  Hawker400 — seven articles
#47  xBBx — seven articles
#48  rwert — seven articles
#49  Hilton — six articles
#50  sterntastic223 — six articles

View the complete list

This will probably be my last Digg analysis post, as I’ve already spent WAY too much time on it, haha.

Following two successful studies on Digg’s Most Popular Domains (and Sorted by Topics), I had an idea for one to finish the series. Ever since Digg removed the top users list, I’m always wondering who is a one-hit-wonder submitter, and who has a track record of submitting high quality articles.

I’ve finally finished adding up all the authors who’s submissions made homepage in the past 30 days (same as before, March 15th 2007 to April 15th 2007), and it had a strangely cool outcome. The number of users who had more than one article hit the homepage in the past 30 days works out to be EXACTLY 300. It’s the small things in life….

And now, a comprehensive list of the top Digg users for the past month:
(are you listed?)

#1  MrBabyMan — one hundred thirty three articles (!!!)
#2  gmark13 — forty eight articles
#3  supernova17 — forty five articles
#4  mklopez — forty four articles
#5  AdmiralAdama — forty articles
#6  1KrazyKorean — thirty five articles
#7  interg12 — thirty articles
#8  skored — twenty six articles
#9  Blakovitch — twenty five articles
#10  IvanB — twenty four articles
#11  noname94 — twenty three articles
#12  populist — nineteen articles
#13  webtickle — nineteen articles
#14  zaibatsu — nineteen articles
#15  ace77 — eighteen articles
#16  webtech — sixteen articles
#17  sepultura — sixteen articles
#18  Andy.D — fifteen articles
#19  tomboy501 — fourteen articles
#20  jstohler — fourteen articles
Read the rest of this entry …

After the success of the recent Most Powerful Sites on Digg study, I decided to invest some time in a follow-up. In the comments, there seemed to be some interest in breaking down this list by the most popular Digg topics, so someone could see an isolated comparison of the top Political or Apple domains, for example. I’ve spanned this research over a one month time period again, from March 15th to April 15th 2007. Unfortunately I’m not very familiar with a lot of the more niche specific sites, so I’ll leave the commentary out this time, and just give you the raw results. Now, without further adieu, the lists after the split.
Read the rest of this entry …

I’ve become increasingly interested in Digg in recent months, and decided to run a study on the most powerful sites on Digg. This is a study over the past 30 days (from April 14th 2007 to March 14th 2007), analyzing which domain names hit the homepage most often, and which domain names received the most diggs overall, irrelevant to the number of homepage appearances.

List 1 - Most Powerful Sites by Homepage Appearances

#1 - arstechnica.com - 121 homepage stories - 91277 total diggs
Ars Technica is an obvious number 1. They rarely post top-ranking articles, with only 3,100 diggs on their top article over the time period observed, however they have a staple line of about 4 smaller articles per day reaching the homepage.

#2 - www.engadget.com - 84 homepage stories - 66409 total diggs
Engadget takes two from all the geeky pleasures Diggers get from prototype phones and ipod rumors.

#3 - www.nytimes.com - 44 homepage stories - 36487 total diggs
Usually hosting stories of school-related misconduct or political polls, the New York Times often provides a trustworthy medium for widely known stories. For example, today’s New York Times article about Google buying DoubleClick reached homepage, trumping over the dozens of other submitted sources about the same story.

#4 - consumerist.com - 41 homepage stories - 59473 total diggs
“Caveat Emptor” is a widely popular theme among Diggers, and I believe the Consumerist is a medium Digg uses to connect together and raise awareness of corporate misconduct.

#5 - gizmodo.com - 33 homepage stories - 34729 total diggs
Going hang-in-hand with number 2 ranked Engadget, Gizmodo further supports with Digg’s geeky gadget addiction.

#6 - news.yahoo.com - 32 homepage stories - 34974 total diggs
Another trustworthy medium (in Digg’s overall opinion) for high-profile stories and interesting oddball stories.

#7 - www.cnn.com - 32 homepage stories - 29821 total diggs
Tied with Yahoo News for homepage appearances, CNN was forced to number 7 by a slightly lower total digg count.

#8 - www.washingtonpost.com - 30 homepage stories - 27867 total diggs
The Washington Post - an alternate digg-trusted news medium.

#9 - news.bbc.co.uk - 27 homepage stories - 23236
I assume most of Digg is US based, so the BBC often adds an international non-biased spin on topics.

#10 - www.wired.com - 26 homepage stories - 18781 total diggs
With recent articles such as “The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers,” WIRED knows exactly how to cater to a geek’s interest.

List 2 - Most Powerful Sites by Total Number of Diggs

#1 - arstechnica.com - 121 homepage articles - 91277 total diggs
With that many homepage articles, how could they not be number one in number of diggs?

#2 - www.engadget.com - 84 homepage articles - 66409 total diggs
Cool, new, geeky gadgets are almost automatically dugg.

#3 - consumerist.com - 41 homepage articles - 59473 total diggs
Getting bumps from articles such as the number 4 most popular article this month, “Google Suggests You Swim Across The Atlantic Ocean,” The Comsumerist easily secures #3.

#4 - www.nytimes.com - 44 homepage stories - 36487 total diggs
A fairly tight race against Yahoo News, the New York Times pulled ahead this month by a margin of 1-2 popular stories.

#5 - news.yahoo.com - 21 homepage stories - 34974 total diggs
Yahoo News, like all the others on this list, highlight the quality of articles written or the quickness of news broken… as each submission gets on average 1665 diggs.

#6 - gizmodo.com - 33 homepage stories - 34729 total diggs
Gadgets are often a hot topic on Digg.

#7 - www.flickr.com - 13 homepage stories - 32531 total diggs
There has been a strong push for a pictures section on Digg, however while each submitted picture that hits the homepage gets a very high digg-count, only having 13 popular submissions from Flickr all month tends to show it might not be worth it to dedicate an entire section of the website to just pictures. Granted other many websites submit pictures as well, so this benchmark isn’t very accurate.

#8 - www.cnn.com - 32 homepage stories - 29821 total diggs
Many articles made popular, but usually not as highly dugg as articles from the New York Times (#4) or Yahoo News (#5).

#9 - www.washingtonpost.com - 30 homepage stories - 27867 total diggs
The same as CNN, many homepage articles, but few high-ranking submissions.

#10 - www.scribd.com - 9 homepage stories - 25474
An absolutely incredible ranking- Scribd hit the top 10 list with only 9 homepage articles. They hold the number two slot on the most popular submissions this month with “What you always wanted to write on your exams but couldn’t,” which greatly boosted their ranking (6500 diggs).

There you have it, the top 10 highest ranked domains on Digg, in order of homepage appearances and total digg count. If enough people enjoy this, I might do it again over a larger time-period (maybe even from digg’s very beginning until now, using archive.org).

They had an overwhelming response of people supporting them to buy Sealand, but plans with that seemed to fall apart and now they’re looking into investing in an island of their own. They would them try to claim it as their own country, circumventing international copyright law for good. Hah
http://buysealand.com/?p=7

Jon F (aojon.com), owner of WickedFire.com, one of the biggest affiliate (and sometimes borderline spam) communities online, just confirmed MySpace launching lawsuits against over 20 different affiliate-based spam companies. Most of the companies are exploiting the bulletins system in MySpace to send spam to millions of users.

MySpace is choosing to prosecute these companies in California where the anti-spam laws are more harsh and penalties are steeper. for each around $20 to $75 million…. with CPA Empire at the top, being sued for $75 million.

Here is Jon’s entire post (link):

Well, while I sit here typing this, I’m pretty shocked by the news. Here at ASW in Vegas, spirits were high for the last 2 days, but have since been shattered by Myspace’s announcement to sue at least 20-25 ad networks that many of you know all too well. Some really big ones, others are small to medium sized. Basically, they aren’t just going after the big guys in this one, they are obviously doing this to make a point the first time around.

This news is coming from 3 different trusted sources, who gave me the thumbs up to leak the news (even before some of the companies on the list will find out they are on it) but would prefer to remain anonymous. Who can blame them either, eh?

I’ve got a bunch of confirmed sources on the story as well.

Here’s what I know for sure:

Myspace’s lawsuit against the networks are to ban them, and their owners from visiting the myspace.com site.

Myspace is seeking punitive damages from $20 million to $75 million PER network.

Myspace is using the strict California state anti-spam laws as basis for the punitive damages cash amount. These laws are meant for email, not bulletins, but for some reason, they are using this as the reason for the crazy damages suit.

I have a list of 6 confirmed networks and 14-17 unconfirmed networks, but will hold off on releasing the names of them until I am absolutely sure they are involved. I was debating on releasing the names, but seeing as this is one hell of a blow that will most likely kill off a network, I think it’s safer to just wait a bit and see who is really on the list and who isn’t.

The biggest network being hit is CPA Empire for a staggering $75 million.

I’ve been saying this for a while now, Myspace was actively monitoring the spam-friendly haven forum known as Screennameforum.com. The list of networks being sued reads like a shopping list, because they all, at some point or another drafted known Myspace spammers and phishers into their programs to promote their offers, even AFTER cease and desist letters were issued to them by Myspace.

It really sucks that this is happening, but at the same time, I don’t blame Myspace for their actions, nor do I blame them for doing this and using the networks as an example of their anti-spam rules. This should act as a warning to the entire industry, that spam, no matter email or social networking, is probably not the best route to pursue.

And his later follow-ups:

If this does in fact happen, and the confirmed networks are found guilty, we’ll be seeing a lot of people filing for bankruptcy. Shakeups like this are good for the industry in the long run. Kills off the bad ones and only keeps the good. I do feel bad for the networks on the list I have, because I’m pretty good friends with all of their owners and a lot of their AM’s, and would hate to see them close shop and disappear.

It’s 3am here in Vegas now, just got off the phone with 2 more network CEO’s that have confirmed that they are indeed being sued, and both are in the $20M-$30M area. Insane.

When he’s talking about ASW or Vegas… he’s referring to the Affiliate Summit 2007.

The news of MySpace launching lawsuits towards all these ad networks comes in the heels of an official announcement that MySpace is seeking damages from the infamous spammer Scott Richter (source).

However this time, by targeting all sized ad networks, from small to massive, MySpace is clearly trying to send a message through the industry that they’re tired of the abuse of their network… quite possibly the most heavily spammed website on the entire internet.