The Quality of Digg Traffic and the Truthiness of the Internet

Pouring through Analytics for yesterday's blog traffic I noticed something about Digg that probably won't come as much of a shock to social media marketers but does solidly illustrate a pretty good point about the quality of Digg traffic and the trustworthiness of the voting.

See for yourselves:

Ok, so that's 11 visits and a whopping 100% bounce rate.

Now here's the article page on Digg:

So yeah - 23 Diggs. Granted 3 of those were from folks in the building whose IP will be excluded from Analytics, but that still leaves 9 people who Dugg the article who didn't visit the site. That is a whopping 39% of the votes for the article. Of the 11 people who did visit our site, 100% of them bounced - suggesting they didn't read the article.

So what is the quality of those recommendations?

It seems to me that the nature of the voting system on Digg which pretty much requires you to have a large network of "friends" who will vote for anything whether they like it or not so that you'll return the favour, is just another monolith reinforcing the magnificent truthiness of the internet.