Blogstorm had a fun little post a couple of days ago which inspired me to whip up this little search tool. I came across the article on Weblog Tools Collection which had the following to say:

Digg saturation: Patrick from Blogstorm came up with a way to rank websites using a Digg saturation value that he came up with by searching Google with a specific URI. Apparently Google really likes sites that are Dugg.

This got me to thinking… why should people have to go elsewhere to conduct the search, I worked out a method to integrate this into the site without having to leave when I wrote my article on How to Bootleg Everything! So, here is a simple little form you can use to see what your Blog’s Digg saturation level is.
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By Guest Star (and responsible Power-Digger): SuxMonkey of AllSux.com

Have you submitted great content to Digg and wondered why it didn’t make the Digg homepage? Are you just curious about how Digg, the most popular of social media sites, works? Did some content of yours make it to the front page, but you don’t know why it did or why other content of yours didn’t?

This article will start to address these questions, and refer you to further resources to help you on your way to understanding the social news powerhouse that is Digg.com. It will also provide advice for sharing news and information on Digg as well as how to promote your own content responsibly. Keep in mind that this article is about understanding how to build a better Digg community for everyone - not about gaming Digg for personal gain.
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EDIT: I removed the widget referenced below because after a few people installed it (including me of course) it turns out that the links which were appearing were to sites that did not even have the widget installed.

Additionally, the links were often extremely low quality since there was no quality control involved other than self-selection into the program. Bottom line: this service will take away more value than it will add. Sorry about the false start… it sounded great to begin with.

Some of you may have noticed that I just added a new widget to my sidebar. It’s called the Blog Rush widget, and it is a free article promotion service. Every time the page loads a few articles from similar blogs are shown in the widget. And for every time the widget is displayed on your blog, your latest articles will appear on another blog’s widget!
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Saturday was an eventful day for One Man’s Server… It had the unenviable task of keeping up with a record day of visitors!

In one 24 hour period over 115,000 people visited the site. The vast majority as a result of reaching the “Most Popular in 24 hours” page on Digg for people visiting the 13 Billboards post (over 2,500 Diggs so far). I’d like to pass along a special thanks to SuxMonkey for kick-starting that Digg effort. I would also like to send out a special thanks to Roy Kaldung for optimizing the heck out of the server so it can keep up with all of the demand.

I’ve also attached the MyBlogLog stats page for Saturday showing a detail of some of the top incoming and outgoing traffic (Just select the thumbnail for the full sized view). Keep in mind that these stats are not entirely accurate, but are within about 20% accuracy. The true visitor count was likely between 135,000-150,000 visitors.

So, I would just like to take a moment to once again thank all of my regular readers. I find all of this to be very exciting, and of course it wouldn’t have been possible without you!

Just yesterday I posted a video about how I use the Performancing P-Metrics service, and then shortly thereafter when another one of my articles hit the Digg Homepage it occurred to me that I should take a video of the PMetrics “Spy” function to demonstrate what actually happens when 5,000 people per hour are visiting a Web site.

Most people surf the Web unaware that an army of Artificial Intelligence engines are watching your every move in an effort to match interests with commercial messaging. Well, the bad news is… they are. The good news is that a brand new Web site called Thoof is going to use an even better version of this technology to entertain you instead!

Thoof’s founder and CEO, Ian Clarke, arrived at the conclusion that news aggregation sites such as Digg, Google News, Reddit and others provided volumes of articles, but left it to the readers to search endlessly for ones that appeal specifically to you. Being the uber-genius he is, he decided that someone needed to apply some Artificial Intelligence to the process and allow the system to learn and predict user preferences in order to present only articles with the highest probability of appealing to each individual.
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Just a quick note to let everyone know that the site has been partially migrated to the new server. That is to say that the database is now running on the new big daddy machine, although the Web server is still on the old machine. (If you’re a new subscriber you can select the “Digg” related tag below to see the history.)

For those of you who may have been refraining from Digging articles in order to help me keep the server running - Thanks! And it should no longer be necessary! The new configuration should handle a traffic spike from Digg now (fingers crossed), and it’ll be even better in a day or two when everything gets entirely moved to the new machine.

So, at this point nothing would please me more than to see all the articles getting Dugg again.

John

PS - Thanks for everyone’s patience as the site goes through the growing pains!

As I’ve said a few other times now… welcome visitors and new subscribers! Please note that the servers performance is quite erratic at the moment due to the fact that there have already been over 45,000 visitors in the last 8 hours.

This is the third time One Man’s Blog has hit the home page of Digg in the last month (everyone can thank Jimbeau for kicking it off this time. As I write this the How I’d Hack Your Passwords post has been Dugg nearly 1,700 times and is occupying the number 1 position on the Digg Technology page. Thanks to everyone that helped popularize this article!

For those of you that are new, please know that I’ve already purchased a massive new server to move the blog to… I’ve just not completed the migration yet because of a technical problem.

I promise to ratchet the urgency up a notch on getting moved to the new server, so please feel free to keep Digging, bookmarking and spreading the word in general and I’ll keep throwing more and more hardware at the site to handle however much load we can generate.

Thanks for everyone’s patience yet again!

If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it?

Let’s see… here is my top 10 list. I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I’ll probably get into all of them.

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth - yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

Statistically speaking that should probably cover about 20% of you. But don’t worry. If I didn’t get it yet it will probably only take a few more minutes before I do…
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Have you ever gone on vacation and come back wondering why your photos just don’t look as good as the ones you see in magazines? I do all the time, and let me tell you - throwing more technology at it won’t make that big of a difference.

The reason celebrity photos always look so great is:

1. A professional photographer takes them, and they have LOTS of practice, trial and error, and experimentation under their belt.
2. The process involves a huge crew, elaborate set, and a lot of time.

As evidence of this fact, here is a time lapse video of Michael Grecco shooting Martin Scorsese for OnDirecTV magazine.
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On Thursday February 8 one of my recently posted articles was Dugg and then proceeded to almost immediately go viral.

The rush to my site was so overwhelming that it completely disabled the server for the first 3 hours. Here is what I did to bring it back online, and how I shored things up for the future.
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People have accidents. That’s not what this post is about. People also do stupid, reckless things. But we’re not focusing on that now either.

This is about people that obviously lack the requisite skills to operate a motor vehicle - who were also unfortunate enough to have the evidence caught on film.
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