A Tricky Way to Get Web Traffic

Here's a zany idea for folks who want to attract some traffic to their websites.

As many of you know, there is a very popular news site called Digg.com where users flag (they "digg" them) interesting news stories. The ones that get flagged/digged the most end up going to the front page where millions of visitors read the stories. While it is aimed at sort of a "democratization" of the news, the end result is that some interesting odd-ball articles and websites bubble to the top.

If you wanted web traffic, in theory, you could try to get your friends to "digg" your website so it would be seen by millions of people. The problem with this, however, is Digg has a very efficient and large community of users who digg articles. You would literally need 1000's of people to digg your site to make a blip on the website.

However, a few weeks ago, Netscape.com converted its format to be a copycat of Digg. Netscape is a huge but declining portal (I guess from the days when people used netscape browsers) with millions of visitors per day. However, they have very few "diggers" who flag articles. In fact, all you need is a couple of dozen people to flag your site/blog to make it on the main page and get exposed to millions. It's a temporary anomaly that their readership is disproporationately large compared to the number of people who influence what makes the main page. My guess is you could pretty easily influence what shows up on netscape.com

So, if you're doing something interesting, why start a compaign to get it posted on Netscape.com?