A couple of days ago, Tris wrote a blog post for the b5Media blog he writes for at Pimp Your Work, and the post made it to page 1 of Digg. In that post he did a link to this site as an example of how to do an email signature. As a result, the all the people at Digg also came to this site following the link. The mention caused us to get approximately 100 people an hour visiting the blog.
I followed along with the spike in traffic and looked a little at where the people that were coming to the site were coming from and looking at patterns. I checked the analytics, and was wondering if this increased our subscribers or perhaps whether it made for more readers that would return.
Finally, I looked over at the My Blog Log widget in our sidebar and it dawned on me that the visitors it showed had not changed for most of the day. Those of you that know how that widget works, when you visit a site with the widget installed, and you are also a member of the My Blog Log community, your avatar shows in the widget. I explain this because with hundreds of new visitors that day, none of them were members of My Blog Log. This meant that the people at Digg (what we call the Digg Nation) are not also members of the My Blog Log Community.
This makes me wonder if people go with one social network and stay with that network, not also belonging to other groups. Do people go with Facebook and not also go with MySpace? If you use one tool do you not always use a competitor tool? One thing for sure, with all of those visitors, if they had been My Blog Log members, that widget would have been smoking.
Interesting isn’t it. Several parallel worlds online and each with their own social rules. Digg is particularly interesting to me. The dynamic and rules remind me of gatekeepers.
[...] No this isn’t stating just the obvious, it’s stating something very important and perhaps profound in terms of how we perceive the Internet as an egalitarian place of knowledge and information. Yesterday Jim, in an uncanny bit of foreshadowing, was comparing Digg users versus MyBlogLog users and mused about Facebook and MySpace: This makes me wonder if people go with one social network and stay with that network, not also belonging to other groups. Do people go with Facebook and not also go with MySpace? If you use one tool do you not always use a competitor tool? One thing for sure, with all of those visitors, if they had been My Blog Log members, that widget would have been smoking. Source: One By One Media ? The Digg Nation Not My Blog Log Community [...]
You know I’ve noticed a similar thing since I’ve begun tracking my site stats. Most of my traffic (while little) comes from other sites and not from MyBlogLog.
But you know what would be very neat to see, is someone develop a “blog community” using the facebook sdk. Considering my audience is primarily college students I would see more activity out of such an application versus the service provided by MyBlogLog.