Sharing the front page of digg with Paris Hilton

Parallels 3.0 was released yesterday and MacUpdate submitted the release news to digg, a social news site that empowers users to pick what headlines are interesting and appear on the front page. If you dugg the story, thank you!

Apparently the skills of studying a bunch of SEO (search engine optimization) and social marketing websites paid off. The first story we submitted to digg ended up sharing the front page with the important Paris Hilton jail news.


Have you heard of the "Slashdot effect?" It's where a site like Slashdot links to your website and a ton of people visit that link in a short period of time. Many people that get on the front page of digg tell stories of their webservers crashing because of the high traffic volume. However, we only showed a small spike in traffic last evening. The bandwidth graph for MacUpdate's main webserver is shown below:


Over 2,100 diggs and 160 comments later, it was a fun experience, but not really that beneficial in a tangible sense.

I can't believe I just made some of our bandwidth graph data public! What do you think about organizations that are as transparent as this, publishing real data?