Word of the Week: Digg

As I sit here on a cold, dark Saturday morning, I thought it might be time to add a new feature to CN. Each Saturday I will take a look back at the previous week and pick a word that was the hottest for the week. For this initial installment, I have selected Digg as the word of the week that was February 18, 2007

Why? Because you couldn't read a tech blog this week without a mention of Digg. In fact, the mainstream press is starting to report on Digg? Why? Because they like Digg? No. It's because discussions about how great Digg is get frontpage'd and sites like Forbes and Fortune want this publicity and traffic. So on to the Digg bandwagon they hop. The week began with the article from the WSJ about "The Wizards of Buzz". Here is a perfect example of what I am talking about. This article had 431 diggs and made the home page in mere minutes of being posted on Digg.

Digg is one of the hottest properties going today. It seemed last winter, there were some concerns if Digg would even make it. Now it appears they might be the YouTube for 2007. The big difference between the two is that YouTube hit mainstream and became a household word like Google. Digg is not there yet from my research.

In related news, the Digg television show Diggnation aired from a Virgin America jet. 2286 diggs. Forbes ran a story early in the week about "New York joining the Digg Nation". 1059 diggs.

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There is no doubt that anyone who puts any type of voting model on their site is now copying Digg. You are on notice.

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And you certainly don't want to piss off the Digg community. See the following:

• Yahoo Shamelessly Rips Off Digg and Brags About It

Some of the good reads that relate to Digg for the week:

• Yahoo Launches Digg-Like Suggestion Site
• Dell 2.0: Launches Digg Clone and Video Sharing Site
• The Digg Mob Claims Another Victim
• Dell Rips Off Digg - Another Diggstorm in the Making - I like Pete's quote: "Frankly, I don’t care that Dell is “copying” Web 2.0 ideas"

Digg was certainly the hot property this past week. Any ideas what the word will be for next week? I am going to bet on Microsoft, Yahoo or Google.