Playing about with Digg
Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/NE100000021440/
For the last two day's I've been mucking about with adding links to Digg (and del.icio.us) to Press Releases.
Why bother I don't hear you ask! Well, the story about Sleep deprivation and obesity had about 2000 hits yesterday – half of these came from Digg.com and BoingBoing (which picked up the story from Digg).
I think that demonstrates the value of these services in terms of communications activity.
So, to make life a bit easier I've added a few links to the Press Release. Firstly a link that lets you submit a story to Digg. Secondly a link that lets you submit a story to del.icio.us. Finally a counter that tells you how many people Dugg this story and a button that let's you register a vote too!
Unfortunately this last only seems to be working in Firefox, which is a pain, but I will endevour to resolve this for IE next week.
I have warned my colleagues in the office not to Digg their own stories as this would be evil. Hot coals have been prepared just in case!
14 Jul 2006 16:00
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Tags: Press Web Stuff
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[Skip to the latest comment]John Dale
That's really interesting. How did the story get started on Digg? Did you provide the first Digg yourself? If not, how did you find out that it had been, er, Dug?
How many of the poeple who visited the page went on to either (a) download the podcast, or (b) follow the link to the story on ResearchTV.com?
I wonder if it would be worth us adding Digg/Reddit/Delicious functionality into the system somehow, to make it easy for people to add buttons to do that sort of thing on pages where they think it might be worth it.
14 Jul 2006, 18:39
The story was orginally dugg by someone in the US. I would not wish to enter into the murky practices of digging my own content as this is a questionable tactic at best – hence my warning to colleagues. I found out about it when Chris mentioned we'd been on Boing Boing and their article provides the source as digg.com.
There were 67 hits on the podcast page that originated from the press release. It get's trickier from that point on to determine who actually downloaded the file. Since the 10th July there have 104 external downloads for that MP3. Since the podcast was released in mid june it's had 362 downloads – so about a third in the last week.
This compares to 31 hits on Research–TV derived from the press release, so roughly half of the traffic that went to the podcast.
I think the additional buttons are an interesting idea but probably only of use to Press Releases, Blogs and Podcasts/Vcasts. For normal content you can see del.icio.us would be good but probably not Digg. I would also want to reinforce the idea that you can't digg your own content. I would hate for us to get accused of spamming the Digg community. However, I am going to be all for tools that help the Digg Community (and others) work with Warwick content. For example, Peter and I have discussed making a selection of Warwick pictures available under a creative commons licence so that people can freely use them in Wikipedia etc. I have also talked to Peter about making Warwick Experts available to podcasters and bloggers in the same way they are available to Journalists and media types.
BTW – as a point of comparison, an earlier press release for research by Andrew Oswald on voting patterns which received a lot of blog/press coverage received around 976 views in the week it was issued. The sleep release had 3418 views. Both received a lot of coverage but the Digg/BoingBoing reference seems to be worth triple points! It is certainly worth adding the links for Press communications.
17 Jul 2006, 10:49
John Dale
Hmm. You may be interested in this post on the Digg blog, then.
17 Jul 2006, 13:47
Yes –seen all that
17 Jul 2006, 14:34
David Phillips
Tom do you know about this group who are working on a social media press release… link
26 Jul 2006, 18:34
I'll have to take a look at that
26 Jul 2006, 18:51
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