There have been numerous blog posts about the Digg Effect (one of the best analysis is here). Although I’ve written close to 600 posts here, I had never been Dugg. I’ve thought about posting my own stories to Digg, but that seems pretty darn cheesy. I mean I get more then 100 visits a day and 149 people subscribe to my feed, so I figure I’ll just leave it to those people to submit a story if they think it is worthy.

Well last week a story I wrote got submitted. A happy story would have been that it quickly reached the front page (it didn’t), I got a ton of comments (I didn’t), and some publisher called with a book deal (they didn’t).

I wasn’t remotely surprised. The story that was posted was more than two years old. It was about a topic, Apple and TiVo, that get so many stories posted on Digg that only a handful ever have a chance. And to be honest it wasn’t really well written or that interesting even to me in hindsight.

The story only got Dugg twice, well actually three times but one of them was mine. But the story produced almost 300 page views in under five hours and is still producing a few each day and the story is number 213 now when you do a search for Apple and TiVo.

I found two things pretty interesting. (1) There is more then a little bit of a Digg Effect even when your story is just one, likes thousands of others, that quickly passes into the black hole of the Upcoming Stories section. (2) It makes me think, and this is a very good thing, people actually link over to the story and at least scan it before they Digg it. I had always thought that stories might be Dugg on the title and summary alone.

I can’t stress this second point enough. I’ve been a fan of Digg since the early days, and as it has exploded in growth I was worried that the quality of the front page stories would suffer. I felt the same way when they added sections such as sports and gaming. But that doesn’t seem to be the case in my daily experience with the site.

I will admit the number of stories about certain topics (Linux and Apple for example) are too numerous for my taste, but it is a community and I am sure there are other stories I like a lot that others could do without.

My story, as I said wasn’t that well written and it was two years old. It had no business being anywhere near the front page. Cause if stories like mine make it to the front page on a regular basis, the value of the site to me and others would diminish. And that would be a terrible thing!