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How much bias does those "Digg this page" links introduce?

Sneaky Pete [PersonRank 1]

Friday, September 7, 2007
16 years ago6,695 views

Lots of blogs have those "Digg me", "add me to del.icio.us" links to increase the likelihood that their entry will become popular on one of these sites. Do these things work? Has anyone ever done a test (like posting the same information to two blogs, one with a "Digg me" button to see the difference in citations)?

Digg seems more prone to snowballing, so maybe it's a poor example. But the popular pages on del.icio.us are affected, as are Google search results, indirectly. The general question is: Is popularity still a good metric for the probable value of a page? How much is it degraded by self-promoting blogs?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

> Do these things work?

I would like to see such a test too.

> Is popularity still a good metric for the probable value of
> a page? How much is it degraded by self-promoting
> blogs?

I think any publication will do some "getting the word" out. I also sometimes submit stuff to Digg from Google Blogoscoped, for instance, or tell someone per email about a website of mine that they may find interesting. (You can also disclose this in your Digg submission by using words like "feedback welcome" that indicate you're the owner of that site, for instance...) As long as you focus on the content being useful & relevant & honest, promoting that content as an afterthought is fine in my book, and often really helpful too... for instance, much of the posts here come from tips, some of which are also "getting the word out on a site" by webmasters, but if it's relevant it's very welcome...

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I think there must be some increase in linking when a site provides clickable logos. But for me the interesting question is this:

Is the increase in linking big enough to make up for the slightly degraded user experience (slightly longer page load, less page space available for useful content)?

Sneaky Pete [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Philipp, I agree that it's OK for site owners to promote their content. But I'm wondering about the user end. Is the promotional effect big enough to drown out cool things that somebody just puts on their site? Google Blogoscoped is a good example of a site that has a good mix of original content and important technology-related news. (It's the blog that I have stuck with the longest.) Some other sites rely on good editorial content on news or personal anecdotes. And then there are those that just post entries, pointing to other blogs – these are the type that threaten to make the Internet into a big echo chamber.

I did an informal and nonscientific survey by looking at the top 7 results from http://del.icio.us/popular/

The 6 most popular pages (over some time span) had "bookmark this" links of some sort, including this "WebSlides" web application from Diigo:
http://slides.diigo.com/. It was only the 7th (of 7) which did not self-promote (a shareware book, "Task-Centered User Interface Design
A Practical Introduction") which had 10 times fewer saves than the top result.

Note that this does NOT prove that the "bookmark this" icon caused these blog entries to be popular. They all had well-written headlines and content designed to appeal. 4 of the 5 were in the ever-popular list format ("51 Text Effect Tutorials Every Designer Should See").

Still, I think my perception of del.icio.us/popular/ is shifting from "the coolest stuff making the rounds at the moment" to "the most popular stuff that is being promoted".

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