Lets say you are a blogger. You just wrote a post, which you find really enlightening. The public should read this post. The question comes: Should I go and digg myself?

That’s a tricky question. Unofficially the rule says “don’t digg yourself”, although Daniel Miessler thinks otherwise. He considers it necessary for the promotion of quality content. Stan Schroeder sees it as a dilemma, although he finally supports self-digging. He argues that quality content should not get buried, despite its self-submitted. He thinks

…that the good stuff is easily recognizable from spam and that the quality of content should be the only merit for digging or burying a site.

But the subject that derives from this discussion, is if it is actually worth it.

Digg has some very specific attributes, which constitute digging very complicated.

Digg is highly community-driven

If you are not an active part of the community, your posts have less chances of being noticed. The debate some of us witnessed months ago is an example. Very active contributors have followers, which can assist in boosting their diggs.

As doshdosh explained:

In order to appeal to and attract the attention of all (or most) social media users, you’ll need to leverage the all-familiar brand of the community site while addressing the collective/individual persona directly. Talk to everyone by talking through an identity that everyone instinctively relates to.

Digg consists of a certain group of contributors

Most digg users are still in high school or college.

Very few media and technology professionals — or professionals of any kind — read Digg, and Digg’s high school/college student audience has little interest in the business of media and technology (with the exception of some Apple and Google stories).

It seems that the digg public is not that diverse and therefore concentrates on specific topics. If you manage to decode the structure and form of these topics, you may get yourself digged. But do you want to customize your interests (and consequently posts) for more traffic? It sounds like selling out.

Diggers scan headlines and keywords

The two (out of three) specifications for submission in the clarifies:

• Be controversial and make false promises (it sounds bad, but it works!).

Example: If an article was called “Professor says days of ‘no oil’ are nearing” you may want to use this as the digg title “Days of no oil are nearing”.

• Use keywords in the title that diggers love and that are also relevant to the story.

Example: Amazing high resolution photos of the Sun.

The research of xedant.com on the subject says it all, i think.

Conclusion

• If you are not an active member of the digg community (something that requires time. lots of it) you should let digging to the digg members. Maybe having a digg button next to your posts can assist diggers do their worker easier.
• Out of mainly ethical reasons, I wouldn’t provide material specifically targeted to the digg community. Do your thing and let other do theirs. If you’re good, you’ll get the proper attention.
• There are many ways to get noticed on the social web. Finally it comes down to this: interaction, content and patience.

Digg as every social network is a comlex system and sometimes unpredictable. Although we can study the behavior of its users, we cannot really determine how they will react to every post. The parameters are just too many. But our assumptions can provide some guidelines.