It seems as if I am currently enjoying my personal and proverbial 15 minutes. Yesterday evening, when I came home from my office, I have read the Heise Online news about that Safari security issue, and this seemed interesting enough for me to write a post about that here on the blog. As I try to get more used to post in english (just to enhance my english skills) I have written that post in english as well, and as I am getting used to it, I sent a quick report to digg.com.

I have already dugg some of my posts in the past, but none of them achieved more than about 15 diggs so far, so I didn’t expect too much of that for the particular Safari post as well. Wrong thought, obviously - I didn’t take into account that Apple and their Macs have a particularly larger share on the american computer market than here in Europe. So I was totally stunned this morning when I arrived at the office, opened my email client and was covered with comments on my blog post from one moment to the other.

So I logged in into my counter account for the blog (I am using my own commercial counter service I have started somewhere in 2001 - you can access it at www.powercounter.net) - and it struck me again - more than 5,000 (in words: five thousand!!) visitors since midnight, and there was even more to come! You must know that I am normally used to an average 300 unique visitors per day.

The statistics of my counter then helped me find the reason for this huge traffic increase within seconds - that little digg.com post of mine gathered so much interest and gained so many diggs (more than 600 by that time - now, when I am writing these lines, it’s some 850 diggs) that it has made its way to the startpage - and this resulted in an avalanche of more traffic and diggs.

But even more interesting are the backlinks that story has earned up to now - among several blogs and forum sites are theinquirer.net and bluesnews.com - I suppose I should feel honoured, hmm?

So, to sum this up to some reflective results:

• if you cover a topic that seems interesting enough for a larger audience, digg it
• if enough ppl second the interest in this topic by digging it, it’ll make its way to the digg.com frontpage
• this will result in an avalanche of visitors - make sure you have enough content at hand to keep them onsite (unfortunately, I just have started to post in English rather than in German, so most of my content is yet ununderstandable for most of the new visitors - another lesson I’ve learned today)
• obviously the editors of other large portal sites read digg, too - if your topic is really interesting enough, they perhaps cover the topic as well, setting a backlink to you.

Only one fact is a little embarrassing for me up to this point - I just happened incidentally to be one of the earliest English language sources covering the Safari issue, and my total work on this topic was to read the post from heise online, confirm the issue with their demo and to cover the topic in a small post. That’s, well, journalism? Never thought of myself as a journalist, yet Maybe I should rethink that position? Tell me your opinion!