The following results from my little, informal study are hardly definitive, but they are interesting. Someone following up with a more intensive and scientifically rigorous quantitative analysis might find the same thing I did: stories related to Barack Obama are submitted more often to Digg.com than stories about Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Ron Paul.
On the tech side, Google takes the prize against Microsoft, and stories about Microsoft outpace Linux.
Barack Obama
(Photo Credit: wikipedia)
Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content? Not so often, it turns out.
Here’s how I conducted the study, just to get it out of the way, and so you can scrutinize fully. I ran searches on the Digg.com site for [Obama], [Hillary], [McCain], [Ron Paul], [Google], [Microsoft], [Linux], and [NSFW], with parameters to bring back all stories, sorted by newest first.
For the first three pages of each set of search results, I calculated how much time elapsed between submitted stories, and what the average wait-time was for a new submitted story on that subject. I only went three pages deep because, well, I don’t have that kind of time. ;-D
Here’s what I found out:
Digg submitters are just crazy about Barack Obama and can’t go three minutes without submitting another Obama-centric story—literally. The average time between Obama stories: 2.26 minutes. The largest gap between stories: 8 minutes. Total time elapsed in 3 pages of results: about 2 hours.
You’d have to wait nearly twice as long for a story about Hillary, about 4.65 minutes on average. The largest gap between Hillary stories: 35 minutes. Total time elapsed in 3 pages of results: about 4 hours.
You’d have to wait even longer for McCain stories. On average, 6.9 minutes went by between submitted stories. The largest gap between: 33 minutes. Total time elapsed in 3 pages of results: about 5 hours.
I didn’t forget about you rabid Ron Paul fans, though I kind of wanted to. A Ron Paul story popped up about once every 26.45 minutes, which may mean even the Internet has given up on him now. Total time elapsed in 3 pages of results 16 hours, 42 minutes.
Google proved king of the tech sample, with only 5.1 minutes elapsing on average between stories over a 4 hour and 30 minute period. Average time between Microsoft stories: 9.2 minutes, 7 hours total. Linux: 17.5 minutes, 13 hours total.
Just to see how raunchy it got on Digg (strictly for research purposes only, of course) I also checked NSFW submissions. All tech and politics and no play? Pretty much. A not-safe-for-work submission was made on average every hour or so, about 67.75 minutes.
