I love having a story hit the front page on Digg.com. It’s like winning the lottery, or a least winning on a slot machine. You can have a website with literally no hits and then get over 40,000 in one day.

Sunday evening, I was browsing the internet, when I came up with a really dumb idea. I wondered what would happen if I put up a Digg post saying that a hole would be poked in a picture of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for every Digg the story got. So I tried it. I went to Google’s image search and quickly found a picture of Steve Ballmer. I glued the picture of Steve to an old piece of cardboard.

I grabbed a pen, poked the first hole and put the story up on Digg. It didn’t take long for the story to get a few more Diggs. I set up a system so that I could quickly push the photos I was taking after each poke up to my web server. After about 10 Diggs, it was getting late, so the frequency was not as often. I stayed up until about midnight, watching the story every few minutes to see what kind of Diggs that it got. I stopped watching it at around 14 Diggs and went to sleep.

The next morning when I checked the story it had received 25 Diggs. of course 11 of these Diggs occurred while I was sleeping, so they didn’t get to see the picture update. I quickly poked the picture until it had 25 holes in it and snapped a shot. I waited a few more minutes…26…28…31…Popular. That’s when to flood gates opened up. I could poke fast enough at that point. The story was really popular. It got 1500 Diggs in the span of about half an hour. I pretty much gave up at that point.

I poked and I took pictures as fast as I could. After about an hour of doing this, I decided to quit. Two Steve Ballmer pictures had been destoryed and the poking was going out of control. I left the final picture up and just let it be. The story did not stop getting Diggs. It got about 1000 Diggs after that point. The Google Adsense counter was up to about 38,000 page views. I made $21.19 of the whole thing. It’s not a lot, but it’s something.

So, how did this happen? Pure luck. It was probably one of the dumbest things to be on Digg.com’s front page and it certainly didn’t really deserve to be there. There are so many comments in the post about how lame the story is and why it shouldn’t be there and I’m here to tell you all that I agree. That was not something that should be on Digg, but it was. I had fun doing it and I hope that I can do the same type of thing many more times.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Ideas, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.