The top 5 Digg Tools to Make you a Better Digger

Regardless of whether you love it or hate it, you can’t deny that Digg has has a profound effect on the internet and how bloggers prepare their sites. No longer are bloggers solely concerned about getting the site right for Google - they’re now also trying to make their content “Digg-worthy“.

The site has spawned thousands of loyal users who digg constantly to make sure the stories they like get to the front page. This has led to a small elite group of users forming with too much power which has been criticised by other Diggers. Another group dubbed the “Bury Brigade” has also attracted criticism for their tendencies to automatically bury stories they don’t like.

But the positive sides to being “dugg” include sudden exposure, long term linking, better indexing on the search engines, the chance to build up online networks and more RSS subscribers. Digg even inspires people to write songs. Make Use Of positively benefits from Digg, with some of the stories eventually being dugg to the front page.

Since I have started to use Digg a lot more recently, I have started to take a look at some of the third party apps out there to make your Digg experience a better one. There’s more than just the official Digg tools out there. There are so many to go through so I have just chosen five that I particularly liked.

(1) DiggTop

This sleek little desktop app runs on Adobe AIR and is actually quite nice to use. You can read a summary of each story by clicking on it. You can also jump to different categories and see the stories coming in.

But to actually digg a story, it takes you to the Digg website. As yet, there is no built in functionality to digg inside the app. Nevertheless, this is a nice tool to have on the desktop to monitor stories coming in.

(2) Digg Oracle

Digg Oracle allows you, with the aid of Google Gears, to download all of your Digg history onto the Oracle website which can then be searched by Google. Very useful if you use Digg as a bookmarking tool and you need to locate a page again. Some people may be wary though as Google Gears is still beta software and as a result, often causes the browser to crash repeatedly.

(3) Digg This! Firefox browser button

I use this on a daily basis. It sits at the bottom of the Firefox browser and when you go to a page, it tells you how many diggs the page has. If you want to digg the page, just click the button and you’ll be taken to the Digg site. The button is also a good indicator of a page’s popularity if you are searching for information online.

(4) Two browser tools

A search plug-in for Firefox and a browser bookmarklet which allows you to quickly submit to Digg.

(5) Diggwatcher

A webpage where you can monitor the number of Diggs a post is getting. It plays sound effects when a certain number of diggs are reached.

The same author also made an online comment tracker. Simply enter your username and it will count all Digg ups and downs your comments get.

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger, writer, English tutor and digger. Check out his blog at www.betterthantherapy.net

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